Hehe... first of all it would be helpful if you told us what you wanted your program to do :) It seemed like you wanted to go through the man and pull out the section between the NAME and the SYNOPSIS. First, a few bugs in your program (I have them listed with comments) :

# Im not sure if this pipe will open;
# I'm not on a linux machine right now
# so I'll just trust that this works.
open (MAN, "/usr/bin/man ssh |");
while (<MAN>)
{
s/^\s+//g;
push(@ml,$_);
}

# what is this loop supposed to do?
# line isnt used anywhere else in the loop and
# you aren't modifying @ml at all...
foreach $line (@ml)
{
 $line =~s/\n$//;
 $line =~s/^\n//;
 $line =~s/^\s+//;
 
}


for ($x=0; $x<=45; $x++)
{
  if ($ml[$x]=~/NAME/)
  {
    while($ml[$x] !~/SYNOPSIS/)
    {
     # forgotten semicolon
     $nl .= $ml[$x]
    }
  }
}

[download]

Heres what I did to "fix" it: 

open (MAN, "/usr/bin/man ssh |");
while (<MAN>)
{
    s/^\s+//g;
    push(@ml,$_);
}

# apply the substitutions to each element of @ml
map (s/\n$//, @ml);
map (s/^\n//, @ml);
map (s/^\s+//, @ml);

for ($x=0; $x<@ml; $x++)
{
    if ($ml[$x] =~ /NAME/)
    {
        # new loop starting at one element past
        # the current, appending the current line
        # to $nl.  Stops when SYNOPSIS is encountered
        for ($x++; $ml[$x] !~ /SYNOPSIS/; $x++)
        {
             $nl .= $ml[$x];
        }
    }
}

[download]

Well, there ya go. Of course, I could have completely misunderstood what you wanted your program to do... and if thats the case... I'm sure I'll get laughed at :)

In reply to Re: script debug by jryan
in thread script debug by Anonymous Monk

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