I can do this easily in bash, but it's slow on big files due to the hard drive i/o limitations. So I need to load the files into memory and do the same. Here is the method via bash: grep $SEARCH_TERM $FILE_1 | grep -c Z Basically it's grepping each line of a file for 2 conditions and returns the total count. How do I do this in perl? I tried loading the entire file into an array: 
 open my $C_LOC, '<', $C_LOCATIONS_FILE;
chomp(my @C_LOC_ARRAY = <$C_LOC>);
close $C_LOC;

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But but scanning the array turns into a mess pretty quickly. Again, I'm using arrays because these are big files (gigabytes) and I need to do thousands of searches without having to load the file from hard drive each time. Thank you so much for the help! EDIT:
================
This takes 46 seconds:

my @foo = grep (/100008020/, @C_LOC_ARRAY);
my @foo2 = grep (/Z/,@foo);

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This takes 0.823 seconds
 grep 100008020 OT.file | grep -c Z

How do I speed up my perl?

EDIT #2
================
I have a flat (text file) that looks like this:

Tommy Z
Tommy Z
Chris Z
Chris B
Chris Z
Jake Z
Jake Y

I'm simply counting how many Z's each person has and ignoring all other letters.

Output would look like this for 8 million people

Tommy 2
Chris 2
Jake 1

In reply to Nested greps w/ Perl by wackattack

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