Having that cleared, now you can concentrate on your regex issue in line 25 ;-)

I thought about your code and there are some other topics:

• use lexical filehandles and the three argument form of open; e.g. see: Perl Maven - Open files in the old way
• avoid "global" variables; e.g. if you need them only as loop variables; use the smallest scope possible; e.g. no my $i; for $i ( ...); better: for my $i ( ... )
• Shouldn't you print $participant only if the regex match was successful
• maybe you can use glob() to find the wanted files?

Here's an untested rewrite based upon these ideas:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=1120387

use strict;
use warnings;


my $log_dir   = '/home/user1';
my $log_file  = "$log_dir/trans.log";

my $trans_dir = '/data/directoy1';


# Log handles
if ( not open my $loghandle, ">>", $log_file ) {        # lexical hand
+le and three argument form of open()
    # syslog ... # what's this?
    die "Cannot open file $log_file: $!";
}



# maybe instead of opendir ... and readdir ...
my @files = grep { -f } glob( "$trans_dir/*OT*" );


foreach my $file (@files) {

   print STDERR "File: $file\n";
   print "$file\n";

   open my $fh, "<", $file                              # same here; l
+exical file handle and 3-arg-form of open()
       or die "Cannot open $file: $!";

   while ( my $line = <$fh> ) {

        if ( (my $participant) = $line =~ m{(.....)/} ) {       # expl
+icitely use $line for regex
            print "$participant";                               # only
+ print when match was found
        }
   }

   close $fh;
}
[download]

Thanks Linuxer, you adaption worked a treat (inluding glob)

Just so people know I have only been on a 3 day course and I am "self teaching" the rest. So I really do appreciate the assistance and suggestions

That being said :0), I am now moving the script on so that it reads each line and tries to match 2 values, both of which can be either one value or another

I.E the first value can be 7722 or 59001 (appearing before the first occurence of /) and the second value can be N or U or C (which is the 362 character on the line)

Once it matches both it should print the line, if not skip past it.

I've had a go, but once again getting an error

#!/usr/bin/perl

# http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=1120387

use strict;
use warnings;


my $log_dir   = '/home/smithc';
my $log_file  = "$log_dir/trans.log";

my $trans_dir = '/data/FSA_Retrieval';


# Log handles
if ( not open my $loghandle, ">>", $log_file ) {        # lexical hand
+le and three argument form of open()
    # syslog ... # what's this?
    die "Cannot open file $log_file: $!";
}



# maybe instead of opendir ... and readdir ...
my @files = grep { -f } glob( "$trans_dir/*OT*" );


foreach my $file (@files) {

   print STDERR "File: $file\n";
   print "$file\n";

   open my $fh, "<", $file                              # same here; l
+exical file handle and 3-arg-form of open()
       or die "Cannot open $file: $!";

   while ( my $line = <$fh> ) {

        if (/(7722/|59001/)/ && /.{361}(N|U|C)/) {
        print;
        }

        }
  

   close $fh;
}
[download]

When I run a perl -c against the script I get the compile error

Unmatched ( in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/( <-- HERE 7722/ at test2.pl line 37

/(7722/|59001/)/
[download]

If the slash is used as the delimiter, you can't use it as literal, you have to backslash it. Or, switch to a different delimiter:

/(7722\/|59001\/)/
# or better:
m=(7722/|59001/)=
[download]

لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

for $line (<FILE>) {
[download]

The part in parens produces an anonymous array that the "for" will iterate over, and the last element of that array the "undef" element from the last attempt to read from the file handle and encountering 'eof'. If you used a while loop instead, you wouldn't enter the block (lines 25 and 26 would not be reached) on that last attempt to read from the file.

um, none of that :) if the match fails $participant is undef , when you try to print var which is undef you get uninitialized warning

$ perl -MData::Dump -we " open $fake, q{<}, \qq{a\nb\nc\n\n}; for(<$fa
+ke>){ dd($_); }"
"a\n"
"b\n"
"c\n"
"\n"
[download]

Thanks - that should teach me to avoid posting guesses...