Also, double-check that you have a file name "bigfile" (and not "bigfile.txt") in the same directory as the script. If you're on a Unix system, then case in the filename is significant (e.g., "bigfile" isn't the same as "Bigfile").

And please, in the future post your questions once. There might be a slight delay before your question is "approved", at which point it will be visible when you look in Newest Nodes.

Oh I see. I'd like to direct you to scottstef's How to ask questions the smart way. and jeffa's How (Not) To Ask A Question. What you've posted so far is very unhelpful. At a bare minimum you should include your program text (or more likely just the part that fails) and a description of the errors you get.

__SIG__
printf "You are here %08x\n", unpack "L!", unpack "P4", pack "L!", B::svref_2object(sub{})->OUTSIDE

    open FILE, "bigfile" or die "Open failed because: $!\n";
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Revealing the mystery operating system and including a copy of the ls -l or dir, or whatever that might provide sufficient clues to us hapless volunteers to get you where you want to go. Something I have ruled out has been the source of my problems; perhaps the same is true of yours. Bob

Here you can use a buffer with a certain length and read that number of bytes at a time into thiis buffer.

OTOH, If the problem is that you can not split on the default line endings, you might also try setting $/ to something more suitable (e.g. when the file doesn't contain newlines and you're reading a line at at time).

{
  local $/ = '>'; # you were looking for this one, right?
  open(FILE, "bigfile.big") or die $!;
  while (<FILE>) {
    # do interesting stuff
    # e.g. merely count lines...
  }
  close FILE;
}
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--
Cheers, Joe