[lessbergstein]

Why are you using cat at all? Use a pipe. This isn't hard stuff. Don't use <>, feed the file into a scalar or array. it should only take a few seconds to process a billion lines.

https://www.perl.com/pub/2003/11/21/slurp.html/#:~:text=Anot....

[sobellian]

If it isn't hard, then perhaps you could demonstrate with a complete perl program that you think should beat java.