Rich Fernandez:
: Is there an advantage to using "read", as you did above, as opposed to
: just saying:
:
: while(<MOVIE>){print;}
: close MOVIE;
:
: Or is it just a case of TMTOWTDI?
It's more efficient to read() binary files than to loop through them
with <>. "while (<...>)" is good for text files, where the concept of
"individual lines" has meaning. However, for binary files, it doesn't;
you just want (preferebly not tiny) chunks of bytes, so there's no need
to go scanning through looking for record separators (which could be
plentiful in a binary file).
It also removes the temptation to shorten the code to:
print <MOVIE>;
which (I learned the hard way) will first create a list of "lines" from
your binary file, and then print them. Lists can be horribly
inefficient with memory: I was getting out-of-memory errors just
printing .5Mb files.
If all I want to do is print a file to STDOUT without munging it in any
way, I use read(), even if it's a text file.
-- tdk
