Good morning, I am working hard to get a grip on regular expressions and have tried working with them for the past few days to accomplish my object. That objective is: to break apart output from the 'quota -v' command and print it in an html table. I am confident (thanks to the very helpful responses of previous posters) that I can apply html tags to the individual parts of the output once I have it broken apart with regular expressions. The 'quota -v' command outputs: 
Disk quotas for jjasinsk (uid 6722945):
Filesystem     usage  quota  limit    timeleft  files  quota  limit   
+ timeleft
/var/mail      10688  15360  16384                  0      0      0   
+         
/export/home3
               98386 307200 308224               2003      0      0

[download]

With the following code, I am able to remove all of the extra white space and that weird newline that occurs after /export/home: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

$input=`quota -v`;

$input =~ s/\/export\/home[1-5] *\n/\/home/;
$input =~ s/\s+/ /g;
$input =~ s/\/var/\n\/var/;
$input =~ s/\/home/\n\/home/;
$input =~ s/: /:\n/;
print $input;

[download]

The output of this code is: 
Disk quotas for jjasinsk (uid 6722945):
Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit timeleft 
/var/mail 10688 15360 16384 0 0 0 
/home 98386 307200 308224 2003 0 0

[download]

However, I am finding that, what used to be very simple in unix is slightly more difficult in perl. I would like to "grep" for and remove the first two lines of the output. Better yet, I would like to store the first line in a variable so that I might display things like the uid or the username somewhere else on my html page.
I have read through various sources on regular expressions, including one from "Perl Black Book", the online source "Perl Regular Expression Tutorial," and have looked up information on grep and egrep, but have had no luck in being able to separate those first two lines from my output. If anyone here would be gracious enough to give me a few pointers, I would be very appreciative. Thanks for your time.

In reply to Irregular Expressions by JoeJaz

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.