It sounds like you just want a simple script to open a file, find the line that says "total", and report the last two rows of numbers. Here is some code to do this : 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl

print "Input file name: ";
$_ = <>;
chop;
open(INFILE, $_);
while (<INFILE>)
{
        if (m/total/)
        {
                s/^total\s[0-9]+\s[0-9]+\s([0-9]+)\s([0-9]+)$/$1 $2/;
                print;
        }
}
close INFILE;

[download]
There are probably 3 things in this script that are non-intuitive to the budding Perl programmer :

1) The use of $_
2) The use of <>
3) The use of regular expressions

Here they are, demystified :

1) $_ is the "default variable" when you don't supply any other variable name to a sub (such as chop and print in our example).

2) <> abbreviates <STDIN>

3) There are two regular expressions in this example, the first one is a matching regular expression (m/total/) which returns true if and only if the text "total" exists as a substring of $_

The second regular expression is a search and replace regex.
s/^total\s[0-9]+\s[0-9]+\s([0-9]+)\s([0-9]+)$/$1 $2/

[download]
all it does is replace "^total\sA\sB\sC\sD$" with "C D" where ^ (caret) matches start of line, \s matches space, and A B C and D are numbers (1 or more digits). The use of the parenthesis following the first / provides Perl's regular expression engine the ability to do what is called "backreferencing" (using $1 and $2 after the second /).

Let me know if that code works for you, and if there's anything else you'd like to do.

-verbal </CODE>

In reply to RE: RE: Re: required explicit package error. by verbal
in thread required explicit package error. by Paav

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.