note mbethke <p>Considering the OP deals with multi-GB files I'd prefer the slightly uglier assignment to <code>$_</code> because the kite's tail is not optimized away so all the strings would actually be shoved through the binary negation twice.</p> <p>I was surprised by the result BTW when I looked at the optree; I'm almost completely clueless about what Perl can and cannot optimize but it even a fairly trivial peephole optimizer as in early C compilers could catch this.</p> 1007560 1007587