in reply to use File::Slurp for (!"speed");
You may be interesting in taking a look at the article "Perl Slurp-Eaze" - http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/11/21/slurp.html - which discusses and benchmarks a number of different methods for slurping files.
perl -le "print unpack'N', pack'B32', '00000000000000000000001011101111'"
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