You aske for pointers, here you are:

• replace the logfile with a new, empty one before processing to avoid collisions with programs that write to the file.
• open 2 other files to write the new stuff and the old stuff into.
• use a regular expression for your date (if it's reliably fixed) and the Time::Local to convert it to seconds and to compare it with time(). Based on that difference you can decide whether something is new or old and then put the stuff where it belongs.
• Delete the file you were working on.
• block the active logfile for a short moment and put its contents under the "active stuff" in the "active stuff" file and again replace the active logfile with the "active stuff" file.

You'll need open,close,flock,time,Time::Local,rename and probably File::Copy for that. HTH

--
http://fruiture.de

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.