Hi all, new to the forum and rather a noob in perl matters. Here's the problem. I'd like to process /var/log/messages on a linux system and substitute all whitespaces for commas up to a certain position (to be able to export the file to a csv format). Here's a sample from /var/log/messages:
Oct  1 13:23:25 smoothwall-swe3 kernel: Allocating PCI resources starting at 10000000 (gap: 08000000:f6c00000)
Oct  1 13:23:25 smoothwall-swe3 kernel: Built 1 zonelists
Oct  1 13:23:25 smoothwall-swe3 kernel: Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=SmoothWall ro root=804 ramdisk_size=8192 no-scroll panic=30
Oct  1 13:23:25 smoothwall-swe3 kernel: Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
Oct  1 13:23:25 smoothwall-swe3 smoothd: Loading Plugins for Module "/usr/lib/smoothd/sysinstall.so
I want to replace all whitespaces up to the one after the bold words included (after kernel: and smoothd:). What I have tried so far has proved useless, namely 
#!/usr/bin/perl
open (FILE,"</var/log/messages") || die 'Unable to open log file';
open (TMP, ">/tmp/messages.csv") || die 'Unable to write to file';
while (<FILE>) {
$_ =~ s/\s{1,6}/,/;
print TMP $_;
}

[download]
It just replaces the first occurrence, after the leading Oct. Any help would be greatly appreciated, since googleing has proved rather frustrating. TIA

In reply to perl substitution difficulty by nanouk

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