G'day younggrasshopper13,

For the head part, follow the link already provided (perlintro). This will show you how to open a file; read as many head lines as you need.

For the tail part, this will depend on the size and structure of the file. Here's some options:

• For a small file, (<$filehandle>)[-1] will give you just the last line. If you want more than one tail line, reverse might come in handy, depending on how you write your code.
• For fixed-width records, using seek might be best.
• For large files, the builtin module, Tie::File, could be a good choice.
• There's a variety of CPAN modules that might suit you better; e.g. File::Tail.

You mentioned "first field" and "first column". If that's referring to CSV, see your earlier post, "parsing CSV"; if it's something else, you'll need to be more specific.