Dear Most Merciful and Benevolent Monks,

I come with utter supplication and freely admit my utter ignorance and sloth. I plead with you to have extreme mercy and patience so as to accept my most basic request.

I have a text file called funtime.dat that is comma separated values. Here is a small snippet:

IM,BEN01,D,0
IM,BEN02,D,0
IM,BEN03, ,0
IM,BEN04, ,0
IM,BEN05, ,0
IM,BEN06,C,0
IM,BEN07, ,0
IM,BEN08, ,0
IM,BEN09, ,0
IM,BEN10,D,0
[download]

My Perl code is thus and works with the following output included below:

#!/usr/bin/perl
open(MYINPUTFILE, "<funtime.dat");
while(<MYINPUTFILE>)
   {
    my($line) = $_;    
    chomp($line);
    @data = split(/,/, $line);
    if ((@data[2] eq "D")||(@data[2] eq "C"))
        { 
            printf ("\n type ");
            print @data[2]." ";
            print @data[1].".txt ";
        }
    else
        {
        print @data[1].".txt ";  
        }
    }
close(MYINPUTFILE);
[download]

My output is

type D BEN01.txt 
type D BEN02.txt BEN03.txt BEN04.txt BEN05.txt
type C BEN06.txt BEN07.txt BEN08.txt BEN09.txt
type D BEN10.txt
[download]

Actually what I want is it to concatenate the files into the first file name:

type D BEN01.txt > BEN01.txt
type D BEN02.txt BEN03.txt BEN04.txt BEN05.txt >BEN02.txt
type C BEN06.txt BEN07.txt BEN08.txt BEN09.txt > BEN06.txt
type D BEN10.txt > BEN10.txt
[download]

Please disregard the C and D as those I use for debugging purposes. Obviously I would then pipe the output of the perl program into a .BAT program which I would execute in MS-DOS.

I believe I should be using some global values instead of local values or something along those lines. In terms of when the value of the line is a "D" or a "C", it gets text file stored as a value until another "D" or "C" value is read and then it prints out a "> textfile.txt" and the makes a newline and prints out "type" and so on.

If this is too difficult how about using the last file before the document has a "D" or "C" to pipe it out to such as this following example:

 
type D BEN01.txt > BEN01.txt
type D BEN02.txt BEN03.txt BEN04.txt BEN05.txt > BEN05.txt
type C BEN06.txt BEN07.txt BEN08.txt BEN09.txt >BEN09.txt 
type D BEN10.txt  > BEN10.txt
[download]

You might ask why don't I just concatenate the files in Perl. The thing is I am getting the .dat file and therefore it is an extra step. These .dat files can actually be 1,000,000+ lines so that is why I am using Perl to automate this process.

Thank you so much for your assistance.

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