Question

Given a start and end line number, what’s the fastest way to read a range of lines from a file into a variable?

Answer 1

The following will load all desired lines of a file into an array variable. It will stop reading the input file as soon as the end line number is reached:

use strict; 
use warnings;

my $start = 3;
my $end   = 6;
my @lines;
while (<>) {
    last if $. > $end;
    push @lines, $_ if $. >= $start;
}