Just open an output file and print whatever you want to save off to that handle. perldoc perlopentut and perldoc -f open will explain more.

Also, a style nit: using -r and friends on files you're about to open is redundant. Just open them and then deal with that failing.

open( FILE, $filename ) 
  or die "Can't open $filename for reading: $!\n";
...
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Or something like this which is handy when you're looping over several files

foreach my $filename ( @files ) {
  unless( open( FILE, $filename ) ) {
    warn "Couldn't open $filename: $!\n";
    next;
  }  

  ...

  close( FILE );
}
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Not using the test operators gets even more important when you get into writing files, since test-then-open isn't an atomic operation and you leave yourself open to race conditions.

a) you are using capturing parenthesis without caring about what they capture... (i.e. you are not looking at $1 $2 etc...) in which case (?: ) is better to use, since it does not perform capturing.

b) since you are not looking at what is in $1... the following /^(.*)Passed:/ is very inefficient. The following /Passed:/ is really all you need, and not capturing the .* will actually improve the efficiency. This will have the same effect, it will match a line with Passed: anywhere in it.

                - Ant
                - Some of my best work - (1 2 3)

A useful thing for you to know would be that you can supply an optional filehandle argument to the print function if you would like to print to a file. This optional argument, when not present, defaults to STDOUT, which is why all your output has been printing to the screen. Try using something more like this:

my $filename='out.txt';
my $output  ='perl_output.txt';

if (-r $filename) {
  open(FILE, "< $filename");
  open(OUTPUT, "> $output");

  while(<FILE>) {
  chomp;
  if(/^(.*)Datasource:/){
     print OUTPUT "\n\n", $_, "\n";
     ...
     ...
  }
  close(FILE);
  close(OUTPUT);
  } 
  else{
     print("cant read file ",$filename,"\n");
  }
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See, I opened a new file to hold the output, with a ">" to indicate that perl should create it if it isn't there already. The ">" also will make perl clobber that file each time you run the script, so if the output is important, you should save that somewhere else before you run it again.

Later on in the loop, I print to the filehandle by using it as an argument to print. The final print statement has no extra argument, so it defaults to STDOUT and prints the error message to your screen.

Of course, there is a lot more about standard functions like 'print' and 'open' in the perl documentation. On my system, I would use:

perldoc -f print
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... if I wanted to know more. Hope this was what you needed!

Thanks mull, this is almost what i want but i also need to assign the whole match to an array at the same time.

No problem, just push every line you want to save to an array:

if (/Datasource:/) { 
   print "\n\n", $_, "\n"; 
   push @log, $_;
}
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Modify all if-Blocks like this. BTW, since you append a '\n' to every line you print, there is no need to chomp it off first.

pike

open OUT, ">>filename.txt" or die("Can't open file for append!");
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