Quick answer:
In an ideal world (and most cases), Perl will beat cat in a file read.
Caveat:
If you're running on Linux, this isn't the case, and cat is actually faster. See the enlightened node by tye on this subject here.
A minor work around (read ugly hack) to get Linux to work faster was to use a read statement, and break down the block into lines using a reader object. Seems to work for Linux, but will seriously slow down other OSes.
Malk

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