Re^3: external file reference

[jakobi]

14k lines of normal line sizes of maybe 100 chars isn't that bad. Consider reading the file into something like $hash{userid}.

which Keszler already said while I as usual did forget to check for new replies before create

Then, if you find the hash build time being significant wrt total runtime, while your 14k file is fairly static: consider a lightweight database like sqlite accessed via DBI.

If you've many independent script or parallel script runs, keeping the hash in memory in a separate process might also be worthwile (old-style client server or some shared memory setup - but that's somewhat like a coding challenge looking for a problem).

[Spooky]

OK, ..lets say I do something like this: $hash{$userid} where $userid is a character string. How would I populate this with data elements that would be both numeric and alpha so that when I key in on say "ewh1234" I could pull all or a specific element within the array(?) - e.g., "ewh1234" may contain 'engineer, 23.4, 1.2, local' (4 data items within "ewh1234")? ..thanks