Wow, that's a lot of code. The whole purpose of using an external library is to reduce how much code you have to write!

Try File::Slurp: 

#!/usr/bin/env perl -w
use strict;
use File::Slurp 'edit_file_lines';
my $inFile = shift;

edit_file_lines { m/\>/ && s/(\S+)\s.*/$1/ } $inFile;
__END__

[download]

.... neat, huh? For an in-place edit, that's the way to go.

When I need to do something more with the lines in the file, I usually skip the full monty and go with File::Slurp::Tiny, but in this case that takes a little more coding since you have to build up an array to pass to its write_file method, and you need to create an output file: 

#!/usr/bin/env perl -w
use strict;
use File::Slurp::Tiny qw/ read_lines write_file /;

my ( $inFile, $outFile ) = @ARGV;
my @keep;
foreach my $line ( read_lines($inFile, chomp => 1) ) { 
  push ( @keep, ($line =~ /\>/ ? (split(/\s/, $line))[0] : $line));
}
write_file( $outFile, join("\n", @keep, '') );

[download]
Remember: Ne dederis in spiritu molere illegitimi!

In reply to Re^2: How do I modify a line within the file itself? by 1nickt
in thread How do I modify a line within the file itself? by newbie4659

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