Yikes, what an awful mess.

First of all, the indentation is a mess, making it harder to see what's going on. 

    foreach my $file (<passwd.*>){
    open (PASSWD,"$file");

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Why quote $file? But most of all, you aren't checking the return value of your open. It might fail! 
    $nf="file1";
    open (NEWFILE, ">$nf");

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Why do you do this in the loop? Now you repeatedly open the file, while you only want to do it once. And you aren't checking the return value of the open. 
    while (<PASSWD>) {
            ($login, $passwd, $uid, $gid,
             $gcos, $home, $shell) = split(/:/);
        $USERS{$login} = $gcos;

    
    }  
    close (PASSWD);
    }   
        
         
        

    foreach $login (sort keys %USERS) {
        $gcos = $USERS{$login};
   
    @SKIP = ('adrian','adm','sys','alcatel');
    foreach $login ($SKIP) {
        next if $login eq $SKIP;
    }

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Multiple problems here. First, $SKIP isn't defined (had you used strict or warnings, Perl would have told you). You want @SKIP in the 'foreach' line. Second, you are reusing $login. In the inner loop there's no way to refer to the outer $login. Third, you want to restart the outer loop, so you need a next with a label - now you just do the inner loop again.

You could have written this is: 

    @SKIP = ('adrian','adm','sys','alcatel');
    delete @USERS {@SKIP};
    foreach $login (sort keys %USERS) {
        ...
    }

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    #next if ($login =~ /adrian|adm|sys|alcatel/);

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Now, had you placed anchors (^ and $), this should have worked. 
  
        print NEWFILE "$login\n";
        }
        close (NEWFILE);

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You should check the return value of your close. It might fail.

Abigail

In reply to Re: next if loop by Abigail-II
in thread next if loop by tux242

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