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

I had a similar question/issue. My solution was the following - for either unzipped or gzipped files:

print STDERR "\nReading input file...\n";
if ($file =~ /.gz$/) {
    open(IN, "gunzip -c $file | grep -v '##' |") or die " *** ERROR ***     Cannot open pipe to [ $file ]!\n";
    } else {
        open(IN, "cat $file | grep -v '##' |") or die " *** ERROR ***     Cannot open [ $file ]!\n";
}

I don't know about benchmarking, but it works fine for me.

Best,

Sander