Thanks for the input guys, a few minutes after i posted this question, I thought of a new way to look at the problem. Here is my finished code. Not real pretty, but it works 
sub indextime{       
        open FILE, "<storedata.txt";
    open OUTP, ">exporteddata.txt";
    select STDOUT;
    while (<FILE>){
    push @matrix, [split];
    }
#    print $matrix[0][0];
    $storenum = $matrix[0][0];
    $date = $matrix[0][1];
    @matrix[0] = undef;
    @matrix[1] = undef;
    @matrix[2] = undef;
    @matrix[3] = undef;

    
    select OUTP;
    for $i (6.. ($#matrix-1)){
    print "@{$matrix[$i]} $storenum $date\n";
    
    }

[download]
This did exactly what i wanted it to do. After i got it to read the storenum, i had it read the date as well, which happened to be the second field on the first row. It then skipped the junk lines and wrote only what i needed to the new file. I'd like to thank everyone for helping me with my attempt at a question :) Nadadogg

In reply to Re: Re: parsing/munging problems by nadadogg
in thread parsing/munging problems by nadadogg

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