Here's the code I have so far

As your code seems to overwrite your "answers.txt" file, I suspect you haven't done much testing....

In any case, reading the whole file into an array and then shuffling the array is one approach. Or, rather than shuffling, you could splice out a random line each iteration until there are no more lines left. If the file is so huge that you don't want to read the whole thing in (which is unlikely given the requirements) then, instead of reading the whole file into memory, you could scan it once and save offsets for each line in an array. Then you could shuffle your array of offsets and use seek() when it comes time to actually read the question in.

That should be enough to get you started. As this appears to be a learning exercise, giving you code would probably be counterproductive.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

Looks like you're on the right track, I would suggest using some more Perlish syntax ... for instance rather than print and exit when the open fails, use die and make sure to print the $! variable because it will contain why it died. Also you're using a while loop to put the file into an array but Perl can do that for you automagically. Finally alway use strict and possible warnings as they will help you to debug.

I would probably tackle it like this:

use strict;
use warnings;

"print "This program will ask the user random questions from a file un
+til all the questions have been answered.\n";

open(QUESTFILE, 'questions.txt') or die "Couldn't open questions.txt: 
+$!\n";
my @questions = <QUESTFILE>; # slurps up the entire file
close(QUESTFILE);
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Before I continue, your answer file confuses me... opening it with > overwrites it. And it looks like you are trying to read from it but then you don't do anything with its contents that I can see. I'm going to assume you just want to append the answers.

# this opens the answers file for append
open(ANSFILE,">>answers.txt") or die "Couldn't open answers for append
+ing: $!\n";

# rather than a while loop and a variable just use a foreach # loop wi
+th a range ... $_ will contain the number

foreach(1 .. 10) {
     print $questions[ int( rand( scalar(@questions) ) )];
     my $ans = uc(<STDIN>);
     print ANSFILE $ans;
}
close(ANSFILE);
exit;
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The only thing about this code is that it has the potential to ask the same question twice. You might use a hash to keep track of which questions you've already asked but I'll leave that as a excersise for you :)

Hope that helps!
Chris

use Tie::File;
use List::Util qw(shuffle);

tie @questions, 'Tie::File',"questions.txt" or die $!;
my @qnums = shuffle(0..$#questions);
foreach (@qnums) {
    print $questions[$_];
    # get answer & write to file etc.
}
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# UNTESTED
@ar = <FILE>;

while ( @ar)
{
    my $ind = int rand scalar @ar;
    print "$ar[$ind)\n";
    splice @ar, $ind, 1;
}
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thanks for all the help I think I'm near enough on the right track. Thanks especially for telling me to use warnings and strict because i didn't know how useful they were so I didn't bother using them. Oh yeah the reason why i'm writing to the answer file is because i'm making a seperate program to mark the answers. It's an excercise my mate set but he won't tell me how to do it he said I'd learn more from this site. cheers again.