In your case, just use lexicals. Add this, before you start executing any code:

    my($currentLine, $name, $infilename);
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    if ($currentLine =~ /^ \$name:/) {
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    !/usr/local/bin/perl
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    #!/usr/local/bin/perl
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    #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
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Btrott, Thanks a lot for your help. I still have a little problem I modified the program a little bit. It will be recieving information from a file. The program is supposed to parse the line with total in it. there is file rows there. i need to use the las two, the one with the total.

..... ..... ....  ....  ....
..... ..... ....  ....  ....
total 1234  1234  5678  7894
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I need to use the the numbers "5678" and "7894", and graph them in excel everyday. The graph would be "day" vs "total". I hope this makes what I am trying to do a little easier to understand. Now my code reads...

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
my($currentLine, $name, $infilename);
chomp ($infilename = "temp1.pl");
    if ($ currentLine =~ /^ \$name:/) {
        print $currentLine;
}
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Thanks alot, Paav

It sounds like you just want a simple script to open a file, find the line that says "total", and report the last two rows of numbers. Here is some code to do this :

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

print "Input file name: ";
$_ = <>;
chop;
open(INFILE, $_);
while (<INFILE>)
{
        if (m/total/)
        {
                s/^total\s[0-9]+\s[0-9]+\s([0-9]+)\s([0-9]+)$/$1 $2/;
                print;
        }
}
close INFILE;
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There are probably 3 things in this script that are non-intuitive to the budding Perl programmer :

1) The use of $_
2) The use of <>
3) The use of regular expressions

Here they are, demystified :

1) $_ is the "default variable" when you don't supply any other variable name to a sub (such as chop and print in our example).

2) <> abbreviates <STDIN>

3) There are two regular expressions in this example, the first one is a matching regular expression (m/total/) which returns true if and only if the text "total" exists as a substring of $_

The second regular expression is a search and replace regex.


s/^total\s[0-9]+\s[0-9]+\s([0-9]+)\s([0-9]+)$/$1 $2/
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all it does is replace "^total\sA\sB\sC\sD$" with "C D" where ^ (caret) matches start of line, \s matches space, and A B C and D are numbers (1 or more digits). The use of the parenthesis following the first / provides Perl's regular expression engine the ability to do what is called "backreferencing" (using $1 and $2 after the second /).

Let me know if that code works for you, and if there's anything else you'd like to do.

-verbal </CODE>

I don't know what you're doing there. It seems you've solved your initial problem, but that code isn't going to work correctly. Here's some code that may do what you want:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while (<>) {
    next if !/^total/;

    my @fields = split /\s+/;
    my($day, $total) = @fields[3,4];

    ## Now graph the values or do whatever you
    ## want with them.
    ...

    ## This will exit the loop after it's seen
    ## the first "total" line. If you don't want
    ## to do this (if, for example, you'll have
    ## several "total" lines, each of which you
    ## want to graph), take out this line.
    last;
}
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To be invoked as such:

    % foo.pl <filename>
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Some points to remember:

• 'use strict' should be declared early.
• I am not sure what you are doing, but based on the code above, you should make sure you declare your variables when using 'use strict'. You never declared $infilename, $currentLine, or $name.
• Again, in the code above, you never opened IN or OUT.
• Yet again, you never grabbed the user-entered text using the STDIN filehandle.
• If you are just going to use the lines from IN in that 'while' loop, you could just:

  while (<IN>) {
      #do something
  }
  close IN;
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I hope this helps.

J. J. Horner
Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix
jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org/

!/usr/local/bin/perl 
print "Input file name: "; 
chomp ($infilename = <STDIN>); 
use strict; 
while ( defined($currentLine = <STDIN>) ) { 
    if ($currentLine =~ /^ $name:/) { 
        print $currentLine; 
    } 
} 
close(IN);
close(OUT);
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Welcome to the Monastery!

Cheers, Curtis