<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">I thought that I got around that problem by using three different file handles, one for each of the three compare subroutines. But it seemed worth testing. I commented out everything but the $fh->open() statement; then I added the file read method; and finally the process the lines method. Here are the numbers:<DIV>$ perl benchmark_hash_vs_grep </DIV><DIV style="text-indent: -39px;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 39px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#555555" face="AppleGothic" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">▼</SPAN></FONT><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>❑<SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><B>A.</B></SPAN></FONT><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><B>Perl Benchmark.pm examples</B></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="text-indent: -55px;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 55px; "><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">•</SPAN></FONT><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>❑<SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">1.</SPAN></FONT><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">open 3 filehandles sequentially </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </SPAN></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>