Dear Perl Monks,

I humbly seek your assistance and beg your patience. I have this huge file with more than a few hundreds of thousands of records which is from the output of tape archive of some sort. I do not have at all access to it to rerun it so as to reconfigure the output. I am stuck with what I got. The file is broken into multi-line columns of data. A new record is indicated by a listing in the NodeName column which is never more than one line in length unlike the other variables. BackupDate is always streaches 2 lines while FileName and PathName can be 1 or more lines in length. Please see a small example snippet: 
Table
----------------------------------------------
NodeName FileName  PathName  BackupDate
BD3101   bananaswi \breakfa       2007-03-06
         ithapple  st\fruit  14:02:31.000000
         s.gif     s\tree\
TP4223   chocolate \sweet\d       2006-02-28
         caramelfu esserts\  21:16:41.000000
         dge.gif   hersheys\
EO2123   tofuwith  \organic\      2007-07-16
         peas.gif  vegetable 13:55:06.000000
                   s\legumes\
---------------------------------------------------

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Desired Output Should be in a single line form but should be able to kept in straight columns. The total width of the output can be huge as long as each variable is of same maximum column width throughout without going into another line for each record. The output should be printed in the following order: NodeName FileName PathName BackupDate. Using the above listed example, the output I would expect from this would be:

-----------------------------------------------------------

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BD3101 bananaswithapples.gif \breakfast\fruits\tree\ 2007-03-06 14:02:31.000000
TP4223 chocolatecarmelfudge.gif \sweet\desserts\hersheys\ 2006-02-28 21:16:41.000000
EO2123 tofuwithpeas.gif \organic\vegetables\legumes\ 2007-07-16 13:55:06.000000


The way I tackled this was to declare the position delimited variables (based upon the above table): 
Column Position of Table 
NodeName   =1->10
FileName   =11->20 
PathName   =21->30
BackupDate =30->End of Line

[download]
Here is what I have written so far but I really do need help: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

{
my $input =$ARGV[0]; #returns filename from command line
my $nodename;
my $filename;
my $pathname;
my $backupdate;
my $textline;
my $nochar ="";
my $charposition;
my $nextrecord;
chomp $input; #strip the carriage return
      
    
open (DATAFILE, "$input")|| die ("Can not open $input:!\n");
                             #access the file
                             
while (my $textline=<DATAFILE>)
        {
            chomp $textline;   
            
            foreach my $textline {
                next if ($textline =~ /($charposition = m/({0}/)!= $no
+char;
                else
                    {
                    $nodename = m/({0,9}/;
                    $filename = m/({10,19}/;
                    $pathname = m/({20,29}/;
                    $backupdate = m/({30).*/;
                    printf ("%s%s%s%s\n",$nodename,
                       $filename, $backupdate, $pathname);
                    }
        }                
close (DATAFILE);
}

[download]
Thank you so very much again for all the PerlMonks who have been a real lifesaver!

In reply to MultiLine Tables into Variables by Knoperl

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