I am intrigued by this answer. Being fairly new to Perl this has opened up a new ball game for me. I have a further question based on the answer you've given.
What happens if all I want to do is to chop out the comment from the fifth field (which is the only one that will ever contain comments) but apply the regex to what remains of the field? e.g. 

aaaa|bbbb|cccc|dddd|eeee|some text to check /* a comment
qqqq|wwww|eeee|rrrr|tttt| I'm not interested in */ more text to check

[download]

Can I do this using your solution ?

In reply to Re^2: while loop logic by Anonymous Monk
in thread while loop logic by Anonymous Monk

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