in reply to Swaping a record in a File

Here's a brute-force way of doing it:

use warnings; use strict; my $matching_line_loc = 0; my $matching_line = ''; open (TEST_FILE, "<test.dat") or die "Couldn't open test.dat: $!\n"; while (<TEST_FILE>) { if (/333/) { #remember matching line and line number $matching_line = $_; $matching_line_loc = $.; last; } } close TEST_FILE; if ($matching_line) { #don't bother with rest if no match! open (TEST_FILE, "<test.dat") or die "Couldn't open test.dat: $!\n"; open (TMP_FILE, ">test.tmp") or die "Couldn't open/create test.tmp: $!\n"; #print the matching line first print TMP_FILE $matching_line; #print everything BUT the matching line while (<TEST_FILE>) { print TMP_FILE $_ unless $. == $matching_line_loc; } close TMP_FILE; close TEST_FILE; #remove original file and rename rearranged file unlink "test.dat" or die "couldn't remove test.dat: $!\n"; rename "test.tmp", "test.dat"; }

Note that this way (and others above) avoids the classic problem of 'slurping' the whole file into memory since it only deals with single lines at a time. Slurping would be pretty bad with a 60 meg file (though it would probably still work.)

This method also assumes that there will only every be one matching line.

Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"