I am trying to manipulate a VERY large file (81GB). The program simply reads in a line from the file, makes any needed changes and prints the line back out to another file on the same disk. The machine I am running the program seems adequate enough (gobs of swap memory remains untouched, IOWait is around 9%, CPU Idle around 70%, and load averages in the 1.25 region). However, monitoring the output, it looks like it will take 166 hours to run. That is a deal breaker. I have been told PERL reads in 8K at a time by default. Is there a way to change that? Or does anyone have any other suggestions, except to quit my pathetic attempts at programming and go back to Everquest... Thanks in advance..