That code doesn't do what you say it does. It searches through the file then prints the line after your target line, and every 3rd line after that till the end of the file. The reason is that the inner while loop continues until the file ends. Also the readline doesn't do what you mean for it to do, it actually reads a line from the file (<FILE>) then uses that as a argument to readline. If you had used warnings it would have complained about a readline on unopened filehandle. readline(FILE)is the same as <FILE> and is not restricted to a while loop so where ever you read that is wrong. Here is a way over commented piece of code that does what you say you want :)

use warnings;
use strict;

my $success = 0;

open(FILE, "<", "dumptape.log") 
    or die "Couldn't open dumptape.log: $!";

while (<FILE>) {
  if (/Dump phase number 3/) { # We found the line
    my $line = <FILE>;   # read the next line
    print $line;         # print the next line
    <FILE>;              # Skip a line
    <FILE>;              # Skip a line
    $line = <FILE>;      # read the fourth line
    print $line;         # print the fourth line
    $success = 1;        # we found it
    last;                # So we're done!
  }
}
close FILE;

if (! $success) {
    print "Failed dump log\n";
}

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In reply to Re: Extracting Text Lines by tedrek
in thread Extracting Text Lines by mikevanhoff

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