tall_man,
Wow! It took a bit to make your code with my benchmark, but the results were quite impressive (25_000 random targets between 1 .. 9_999_999

$ time ./lr.pl

real    0m21.139s
user    0m20.279s
sys     0m0.040s

$ time ./tm.pl

real    0m3.935s
user    0m3.585s
sys     0m0.300s
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