For example, here is a loop which inserts index producing entries before any line containing a certain pattern:

    while (<>) {
        study;
        print ".IX foo\n" if /\bfoo\b/;
        print ".IX bar\n" if /\bbar\b/;
        print ".IX blurfl\n" if /\bblurfl\b/;
        ...
        print;
    }

In searching for /\bfoo\b/, only those locations in $_ that contain ``f'' will be looked at, because ``f'' is rarer than ``o''. In general, this is a big win except in pathological cases. The only question is whether it saves you more time than it took to build the linked list in the first place.

Note that if you have to look for strings that you don't know till runtime, you can build an entire loop as a string and eval that to avoid recompiling all your patterns all the time. Together with undefining $/ to input entire files as one record, this can be very fast, often faster than specialized programs like fgrep(1). The following scans a list of files (@files) for a list of words (@words), and prints out the names of those files that contain a match:

    $search = 'while (<>) { study;';
    foreach $word (@words) {
        $search .= "++\$seen{\$ARGV} if /\\b$word\\b/;\n";
    }
    $search .= "}";
    @ARGV = @files;
    undef $/;
    eval $search;               # this screams
    $/ = "\n";          # put back to normal input delimiter
    foreach $file (sort keys(%seen)) {
        print $file, "\n";
    }