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From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Reading a file into a string
Message-ID: <11235@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 30 Jan 91 19:24:53 GMT
References: <5231@taux01.nsc.com> <1991Jan30.005821.13013@convex.com> <97130172@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 26

In article <97130172@bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
: In article <1991Jan30.005821.13013@convex.com> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
: >1) $foo = `cat $file`;
: >
: >2) open (FILE, $file);
: >   undef $/;
: >   $foo = <FILE>;
: >   close(FILE);
: 
: 3)  open (FILE, $file); $foo = ''; 
:     while (!eof(FILE)) { read(FILE, $x, 32767); $foo .= $x;};
: 
: You can use bigger numbers than 32767...

You sure can, including the size of the file:

4) open(FILE, $file); read(FILE, $foo, -s $file);

or better in two ways,

5) open(FILE, $file); sysread(FILE, $foo, -s FILE);

I sincerely doubt that any other construct is going to beat that, timewise.
(Solutions using syscall(SYS_mmap...) not allowed.  :-)

Larry