As I have tried to explain to you your use of substr is not going to do what you want. However we need to see

1 the exact input data (comma separated)

2 the exact output data (pipe delim) that you want to generate from 1

If you are just trying to get rid of part of the file path you need to use a s/// regex or split $fields[6] on the '\', select the parts you want, join these bits back together with '/' and then join the whole thing with '|'.

  while(<IN>) {
   chomp;
   my @fields = split /,/;
   my $path_str = $fields[6];
   do { warn "Empty field 7"; next } unless $path_str;
   my @path = split "\\", $path_str;
   # remove null fields if you really have \\ in there
   @path = grep { $_ } @path;
   # assuming you want to remove the 17 and 16 dirs in the example
   my $fixed_path = join "\\", @path[0,2,3]
   my $out = join '|', @fields[0..5], $fixed_path, "\n";
   print OUT $out;
}
[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print