I don't suppose fixing whatever's creating those logfiles is an option?

Here's what I might do: remember the previously-read line, and match your search term against both the current line and the concatenation of the previous and current line. Off the top of my head (completely untested): 

my $previous = "";
while(defined(my $line = <>)) {
    chomp $line;
    ($previous . $line) =~ m/$pattern/ and say $line;
    $previous = $line;
}

[download]

(This isn't perfect, obviously; it'll also print lines where the previous line just so happened to match, even though there's no match across the line boundary. But it should get you started.)

In reply to Re: Help parsing badly constructed logfiles by AppleFritter
in thread Help parsing badly constructed logfiles by Amblikai

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