Re: doing a search and replace on a large file

[hardburn]

That's a one-liner, provided your pattern is reasonably small. You don't need to open filehandles if you use perl's command line options and the shell to your advantage:

perl -lne 'print if /pattern here/' old_file.txt > new_file.txt

[eXile]

Or, if you want to overwrite the file use the '-i' cmdline option for in-place editting:

perl -pi -e's/pattern here//g' file

Update: reread question, you don't want to overwrite the file, so you don't want this.