Best way to skip a header when reading in from a text file in Perl?

Question

I\'m grabbing a few columns from a tab delineated file in Perl. The first line of the file is completely different from the other lines, so I\'d like to skip that line as fast a

Answer 1

Your code would probably be more elegant in this form:

my $first;
while (...) {
    $first++ or next; 

    # do whatever you want
};

But it's still fine. @Guru's answer is better in terms of CPU cycles, but i/o usually consumes orders of magnitude more of them than a single if.