I needed to read through a log file looking for certain entries backwards (newest entries first). Perl has a File::ReadBackwards module that does exactly this:

use File::ReadBackwards;

my $file = "/var/log/message";
my $fh   = File::ReadBackwards->new($file) or die "can't read $file";

while (my $line = $fh->readline()) {
    print $line;
}