You have two loops in your code.

Remove the one that you don't want.

If you can't find the inner loop, please explain in plain English what every line of your code is supposed to do and write that as a comment beside each line.

If a line does more than one thing, consider breaking that line into two lines.

Consider adding print statements after every line to see what your program is doing and how it progresses.

ah.... that helps.

while (<$in>) {
$_ =~ s/^\s*\S+\s*//;
print $out $_;
}
[download]

Working now. Thanks

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

while (<DATA>)
{
    s/^\s*\S+\s+//;
    print;
}

=Output
person who asked.
mark one answer.
"accepted".

doesn't mean.
the best answer,
just means that it.
for the person.
asked.
=cut

__DATA__
The person who asked.
can mark one answer.
as "accepted".

Accepting doesn't mean.
it's the best answer,
it just means that it.
worked for the person.
who asked.
[download]

Think about how you would '.. remove the first word' from a line using Perl. Then do that on each input line, and print the result to the output file.

You can do it using a regular expression (in fact, there are probably several different ways), but you could also split the line up into words, then re-build the line using all but the first word.

All you need to process one or more files at once is the following oneliner (caution to windows doublequotes):

   perl -lane "shift @F;print qq(@F)"  filename.ext
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I suggest you to read perlrun where the four Perl switches -l -a -n -e are explained: in breif -l do the rigth thing with line ending, -a does autosplit of the current line filling the special variable @F (F for fields) (see perlvar too), -n wrap the whole code into a while loop without printing each line (as opposed to -p that prints) and finally -e executes the perl code provided.

You can use the core module Deparse to see the oneliner exploded (see also B::Deparse vs. O=Deparse). I added some,I hope useful, comments:

perl -MO=Deparse -lane "shift @F;print qq(@F)"

      # the BEGIN block is executed as soon as possible,so is not repe
+ted at every iteration over file's lines
      # input and  output record separator set by -l see again perlvar
BEGIN { $/ = "\n"; $\ = "\n"; }

      # the while loop created by -n (do not consider the LINE: label 
+for the moment)
LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {

      # remove newline at the end of current string (again provided by
+ -l)
      chomp $_;

      # autosplit provided by -a 
      our(@F) = split(' ', $_, 0);

      # our program starts here
      shift @F;
      print "@F";
}
-e syntax OK
[download]

HtH

L*

++ for the explanation of the switches.

Just an observation: you can do that without the shift operation by printing the array slice @F[1..$#F].

$ perl -lane 'print "@F[1..$#F]"'
The person who asked.
person who asked.
can mark one answer.
mark one answer.
as "accepted".
"accepted".
^C
$
[download]

— Ken

Expanding on what Corion said, you second while loop is what is causing the problem. Instead of

    print $out $_ while s/^\s*\S+\s*//;
[download]

get rid of the inner while:

    s/^\s*\S+\s*//;
    print $out;
[download]

s/^\s*\S+\s*//;
print $out;
[download]

Not quite, that prints the value of $out ("GLOB(0xabc...)") to the currently selected filehandle; the print $out $_; is necessary in this case.

You are right. I blame it on my computer. It is out to get me toda