Hi All, My apologies for not being here for a while. Thank you all for showing me directions to my concerns. i will now share snippet of my code (which is not working yet). As of now i have five lines in the text file, wherein each perl process has to execute only one line upon meeting the conditions i.e "it should match the line which has the word pending". P.S Somehow when i post this script all the indentation vanishes.apologies for that. My script 
use Fcntl qw(:flock :seek);
my $myfile = "C:\\ssk\\A.txt";
open(MYFILE, $myfile) or die;
undef $/;
flock(MYFILE, 1);
foreach my $line (<MYFILE>)
 { 
    $line =~ /(\w*):(\w*):(\w*)/g;
     my $status = $3;
     if (($3 ne "done") || ($status ne "inprogress"))
     { # do nothing } 
} 
    close MYFILE;
 open(MYFILE, "+< $myfile") || die;
 flock(MYFILE, 2);
 my @content = <MYFILE>;
 my $inprogress = "inprogress";
 foreach my $line (@content)
 { 
    $line =~ m/(\w*):(\w*):(\w*)/;
     if ($3 eq "pending")
         {
         $line=~ s/pending/inprogress/;
         seek(MYFILE, 0, SEEK_END);
         print MYFILE "$line";
         splice(@content,0,1);
            } 
 } 
close MYFILE;
Contents of text file 
=====================
cmd:doscommand1:pending
cmd:doscommand2:pending
cmd:doscommand3:pending
cmd:doscommand4:pending
cmd:doscommand5:pending

[download]
Please let me know if i am on the right track, since the script is not working yet.. Do i still need to go ahead with DBMS.

thanks Sachu

Hi All, I have a query in Perl. IS it possible for me to access and modify a single text file through PERL programmes. Can you please provide pointers on how to achieve this. Ok Let me make it more clear ... Let me give you all a brief scenario of what my intentions are. What i am trying to do is,i have to run multiple perl programmes all at once to change the contents of a text file. and the text file would contain 2 things. Test name and status. So as i run multiple perl programmes, i want each prgm to read single line at once and check the status. if the status is pending , change status to inprogress execute that line, and then change the status to done and come out of the programme, else skip to the next line till it finds pending. Just wanted to make sure, this would give access denied error, as the file would be used by another programmes. Hope that helps. Regards, SSK

In reply to Multiple Acess to a single file by sachu

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