If you ever have a text file that you would like to access as a perl array...
...you should look at DBFile or, on newer installs, BerkeleyDB. It turns out (I had some vague recollection of this, and it turned out to be important for my wanna-be-a-hero project) that you can use Berkeley DB to access a text file as if it were a perl array.
This is pretty cool. And fairly efficient, too.