in reply to How to make only two of three substitutions?

The following program reads in a file, and if it finds a line that starts with GRANT, followed by a line containing whatever, followed by two lines containing just a '/', it will remove the slashes from the latter two lines. This is how I interpret what you want; however, your specification isn't very exact.
use strict; use warnings; my @buffer; for (1 .. 4) { push @buffer => scalar <>; last unless defined $buffer [-1]; } while (defined $buffer [-1]) { if ($buffer [0] =~ /^GRANT/ && $buffer [2] eq "/\n" && $buffer [3] eq "/\n") { $buffer [2] = $buffer [3] = "\n"; } print shift @buffer; push @buffer => scalar <>; } pop @buffer; print @buffer; __END__

Abigail