in reply to How do I truncate a flat file, then append to front?

I'd unshift the new records onto @logfile and print the first hundred. What you have should work fine except for printing 102 records, one extra from off-by-one in 0..100, and the other from the added new record. Here goes:

use Fcntl qw( :flock ); open (LOG, "+< /path/to/log.dat") or die $!; flock(LOG, LOCK_EX); my @logfile = <LOG>; unshift @logfile, "$date - $requesturi - ($httpuseragent)" . " $remorehost: $remoteport ($remoteaddr) -" . " $httpreferer\n"; seek LOG, 0, 0; print LOG @logfile[0..99] or die $!; close(LOG) or die $!;

I used a single nontruncating open for read/write so that the lock holds through the read and write cycle. That's so another instance can't leap in with a record to be lost before you write.

I also cleaned up some niceties, like checking for system errors and using Fcntl constants for locking.

Is there some reason you don't want to simply append to the logfile? That would be more normal.

After Compline,
Zaxo

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Re: Re: How do I trauncate a flat file, then append to front?
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 16, 2002 at 05:31 UTC
    The file needs to be read with newest at top.
    Also, I should've mentioned that i'm limited to perl 4.004
      Mind if I ask why you're limited to Perl 4.004? What's the OS? What kind of environment are you in, what do your computers do for you?
        To make a very long story short...it's a RAQ2/Linux Red Hat, and the machine's owner is a disabled vet with few resources. We use it to attempt increasing our self education.