Re^3: Fast parsing for cypher block chaining

[Roy Johnson]

I suspect you will do no worse letting Perl handle the buffering for you:

$/ = \8; # Read 8-byte records. Behind the scenes, Perl will do buffer
+ing of reads.
$out_buffer .= blowfishify($_) while <INFILE>;
print OUTFILE $out_buffer;

Alternatively, you could (with a sufficiently modern Perl) read from your buffer as if it were a filehandle, using the same $/ = \8 trick.

open BUF, '<', \$buffer or die "$!: Could not open buffer\n";
$/ = \8;
$out_buffer .= blowfishify($_) while <INFILE>;
print OUTFILE $out_buffer;

They're tidier ways of doing what you want, but you'd have to try them to see whether they buy or lose you any efficiency. My guess is that the I/O isn't going to be the bottleneck, anyway; the encryption is.

[ikegami]

In the first snippet, you should move the print into the loop to avoid using gigabytes of memory. That seemed to be the point of the OP's buffering.

$/ = \8; # Read 8-byte records. Behind the scenes, Perl will do buffer
+ing of reads.
print OUTFILE blowfishify($_)
   while <INFILE>;