Just a little more Help here..... and I think it will work. I added some stuff to make the script load a file and output a log file. However there is some error in the script that I cannot resolve. Could someone please have a look....?? while we are editing the $text line..... could you also include the value of the most resent value entered in col3 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
       $infile = shift;
       $outfile = shift;
       
       open(IN, $infile) || die("Can't open input file $infile - $!");
       open(OUT, ">$outfile") || die("Can't open output file $outfile 
+- $!");

       use strict;
       my $text;
       my @lines;

       while (<>) {
         push @lines;
         shift @lines if @lines > 10;
       }

       chomp(@lines);

       my @cols;
       my $total = 0;

       for (@lines) {
         @cols = split /:/;
         $total += $cols[3];
       }
       my $average = $total / (@lines || 1);
         # if no lines, avoid division by zero

       
 ***** error here*****      $text= "Average of column 3 for the last "
+ ;#, scalar(@lines)," days: $average\n";
       


      print OUT "$text\n";
    
       close IN;
       close OUT ;

[download]
So the message in the Data.log file would read "<Filename> Average is <average> the last was <most resent entry for col3>" Thank you.. this has been good experience..... wish something like this was in the book I bought. joachim

In reply to Re: Re: BASIC MATH WITH DATA by joachim
in thread BASIC MATH WITH DATA by joachim

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