my $data = "";

while (read (FH,$data, $buffer) ){
       $data .= $data;
}
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I don't think that's going to work very well. Each time do the read in the while you just clobber what you have read before. Perhaps you should append $data to a different scalar. I would also cut down the size of your reads and possibly introduce an updating counter to see how far you have successfully read through the file.

Cheers,

JohnGG