Perl Programming/Keywords/seek

The seek keyword
The seek sets the file handle position as fseek of UNIX. The FILEHANDLE can also an expression that evaluates to the filehandle. WHENCE can have the values 0 to set the POSITION in bytes, 1 so that it is set to the current position plus POSITION, and 2 to set it to EOF plus <tt>POSITION</tt>.

<tt>seek</tt> returns 1 on success and false otherwise. For performance reasons, even if the <tt>FILEHANDLE</tt> has been set to operate on characters, the function <tt>tell</tt> will return the byte offsets.

For <tt>WHENCE</tt>, the constants <tt>SEEK_SET</tt>, <tt>SEEK_CUR</tt>, and <tt>SEEK_END</tt> should be used for portability reasons instead of 0, 1, or 2.

Do not use <tt>seek</tt> with <tt>sysread</tt> or <tt>syswrite</tt>, as buffering makes the file's read-write position unpredictable and non-portable, but use <tt>sysseek</tt> instead.