The strange thing is that I'm not slurping up the whole file
The code you posted *does* slurp the whole file.
foreach my $line (<FILE1>) {
chomp $line;
(do something...)
}
"foreach" is documented in perlsyn as "LABEL foreach VAR (LIST) BLOCK". That means that the contents of the parenthesis is evaluated in list context. In list context, <FILE1> returns an array of all the previously-unread lines in the file. In other words, what happens above is that the entire contents of the file referred to by FILE1 is slurped into a temporary array, and then each item in the array is assigned to $line in turn.
To read the file a line at a time, you need to use <FILE1> in scalar context, something like this:
while (my $line = <FILE1>) {
chomp $line;
(do stuff...)
}Is there a way to force Perl to not slurp up the whole file at once
Yes - don't ask it to. ;-)
sherm--
