G'day Bindo,

See the documentation for the open function. Follow the example for opening a file for reading using three arguments and dying with a useful message when the open fails. Just because the file exists (i.e. -e is TRUE), doesn't mean you can read it (i.e. -r is not necessarily TRUE).

I'd also recommend you take a look at perlstyle: your code indentation is not at all logical which makes it hard to read and is a potential source or errors.

Greetings Ken. Thanks for the advice. Im still a beginner and yes I admit that there are lots of shortcomings in my code. Hope I will get better over time :)

For a start I'd change line 4 to:

open (FH2, "<", "$ARR1{$TAB}/MY_FILE") or die "couldn't open FH2: $!\n
+";
[download]

Thanks. I did check and there were no problems.

I do not get an error from your code. I have made a few modifications to improve layout and readability which you may find interesting. I have not really changed the functionality other than adding a die on being unable to open FH2 as suggested by mtmcc.

use strict;
use warnings;

my %users = %{user_paths()};
foreach my $user (keys %users) {
    if (-e "$users{$user}/MY_FILE") {
        open (FH2, "<$users{$user}/MY_FILE") or die "could not open $u
+sers{$user}/MY_FILE $!";
        while (my $line = <FH2>) {
            if ($line =~ /BASE_PORT=(\d+)/) {
                print  "$user --> $1";
            }
        }
    }
}

sub user_paths {
    my %users;
    open (FH1, "</etc/passwd") || die "Can't Open : $!";
        while (<FH1>) {
            my @user = split (/:/);
            if ( $user[2] > 500 ) {
                $users{$user[0]} = "$user[5]";
            }
        }
    return \%users;
}
[download]

Thank you very much for triying to help me out. However I now get a permission error. "could not open /x02/bee/MY_FILE Permission denied at ./base_ports.pl line 9, <FH2> line 3103. but when I tried to open the file before going on to the regex section it just works, As in it opens up the files on the screen

my %users = %{user_paths()};
foreach my $user (keys %users) {
    if (-e "$users{$user}/MY_FILE") {
        open (FH2, "<$users{$user}/MY_FILE") or die "could not open $u
+sers{$user}/MY_FILE $!";
             while (my $line = <FH2>) {
             print $line;
                     }
    }
 }
[download]

Also I tried commented out the die function and tried to riun and then I get that same "readline" error. Any thoughts?

can you open /x02/bee/MY_FILE from the command line with something like cat? What are the perms if you ls -l /x02/bee/MY_FILE? Does this match your user/group settings?

Cheers,
R.

Pereant, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!

Can you try this version and see if any files are opened?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

# my $fname = '.profile';
my $fname = 'MY_FILE';
my %users =  %{user_paths()};
for my $user (keys %users) {
    my $fh;
    if (open $fh, '<', "$users{$user}/$fname") {
        while (my $line = <$fh>) {
            if ($line =~ /BASE_PORT=(\d+)/) {
                print  "$user --> $1";
            }
        }
    }
    else {
        warn "couldn't open $users{$user}/MY_FILE $!";
    }
}

sub user_paths {
    my %users;
    open my $fh, '<', "/etc/passwd" || die "Can't Open : $!";
    while (<$fh>) {
        my @user = split (/:/);
        if ( $user[2] > 500 ) {
            $users{$user[0]} = "$user[5]";
        }
    }
    return \%users;
}
[download]

Cheers,
R.

Pereant, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!