I was recently challenged to code a program in as few lines as possible by a friend. The challenge, to read a file and look for a pattern in a line. If it found it, then the program would print that full line and a number of lines after it.

After some thought, I came up with the script below: 
open(T,"<$ARGV[0]");
my (@data,$count);
foreach((@data = <T>)){++$count;(/$ARGV[1]/)?eval{print;for(1..$ARGV[2
+]){print $data[$count] if defined $data[++$count];};exit()} : undef;}
close(T);

[download]

The data file contained: 
one
two
thrtestee
four
five
six
werwr
werwer
seen?

[download]

And the program was invoked as 
# perl -w script.pl datafile pattern numlines
perl -w script.pl data.dat test 4

[download]

I wondered if this could be improved upon at all or if there were any unusual tricks I could have used. Had fun anyway :)

In reply to Reading a pattern and a number of lines after it by simon.proctor

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