Update!

Before I posted, I tried a bunch of things and ran it at least a dozen times getting the exact same failure. I the cut the script of the top of the data, renamed the file .dat and stuck the script into a new file of the old name. I changed <DATA> to <> and supplied the data file on the command line and it worked first time.

I've just recreated the all in one script; and now it runs perfectly. I have no explanation for the error or the cure; but I suspect 1nickt called it.

Thanks for your help guys.

I'm getting this error when I try to run the following code:

C:\Motor>parseAns.pl
The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another
+ process.
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Another process is accessing the DATA pseudo-handle?

The data is large 2.4 million, but I'm sure I've processed much larger datasets from <DATA> before; and I've commented out the storing of the data to the array, so it isn't running out of memory. Cluebats anyone?

#! perl -slw
use strict;

my @data;
my $i = 0;

#$data[ $i++ ] = [ split ' ' ]

++$i while <DATA>;

print $i;

__DATA__
-69.282032302755084 40.000000000000014  0   -1
-69.123493781255831 39.908467741935496  -1.4443382565142906e-006    -1
-68.748013135538145 40.911009397420145  0   -1
-68.964955259756593 39.816935483870985  -2.990721348858345e-006 -1
-68.370049396495517 40.298149116372635  -6.3944096502804299e-006    -1
-68.202015544462682 41.814890597403163  0   -1
...
2.4 million lines omitted.
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