Okay, now I understand. The problem, I think, for your situation is this: if you do a great job with this script with mostly borrowed code you will likely be asked to do a bunch more (and starting in April means you won't be done with those classes until what, June?).

You need help now, but it isn't really code snippets that you need. I think you need a few good books that will help you basically do what Sys Admins need to do often. Here is a quick reading list:

There are others, but if I were you I would read Effective Perl Programming cover-to-cover (it is a thin book), scan through the Perl Cookbook for script problems you are having right now, and then read the System Administration book. I used to have this Perl Black Book on my desk for a while until I read the above books and realized that the Black Book (at least my edition) was full of bad programming examples.

BTW, Perl programming can be addictive. Before I started learning Perl I was a professional VB programmer. Nowadays I struggle to remember how to do simple things in VB because I use it so rarely. Welcome to the world of Perl.

Celebrate Intellectual Diversity

In reply to Re^3: Regular Expression Pattern Search Problem by InfiniteSilence
in thread Regular Expression Pattern Search Problem by xdbd063

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