#! perl -w use strict; my $infile = 'c:/doclist1.chr'; my $outfile = 'c:/doclist1.txt'; open IN, "<$infile" or die "Couldn't open $infile, $!"; open OUT, ">$outfile" or die "Couldn't open $outfile, $!"; while() { chomp; my @fields = split /,/; my $path_str = $fields[6]; do { warn "Empty field 7"; next } unless $path_str; my @path = split /\\/, $path_str; # assuming you want to remove a few directories my @new_path = join "\\", @path[0,5,6]; print OUT "\n@new_path"; } exit;