I'm probably being a little daft, but I'm sort of trying to get my head around the most elegant way to accomplish this, rather than one that 'just works'.
If I run a particular command I (long) list of entries, that look something like: 
Symmetrix ID: 

    Device Physical Name     : \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1

    Device Symmetrix Name    : 0062                (VCM)
    Device Serial ID         : 6000062081
    Symmetrix ID             : 002020202220

    Attached BCV Device      : N/A

    Attached VDEV TGT Device : N/A

    Vendor ID                : EMC
    Product ID               : SYMMETRIX       
    Product Revision         : 5772
    Device WWN               : 222222222222222222
    Device Emulation Type    : FBA            
    Device Defined Label Type: N/A            
    Device Defined Label     : N/A            
    Device Sub System Id     : 0x0001
    Cache Partition Name     : DEFAULT_PARTITION

    Device Block Size        : 512

    Device Capacity
        {
        Cylinders            :          6
        Tracks               :         90
        512-byte Blocks      :      11520
        MegaBytes            :          6
        KiloBytes            :       5760
        }

   
    Device Configuration     : 2-Way Mir       (Non-Exclusive Access)

    Device is WORM Enabled   : No
    Device is WORM Protected : No

    SCSI-3 Persistent Reserve: Disabled

    Dynamic Spare Invoked    : No

    Dynamic RDF Capability   : None

    STAR Mode                : No
    STAR Recovery Capability : None
    STAR Recovery State      : NA

    Device Service State     : Normal

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This pattern is repeated a lot of times, once for each volume in my storage array.
What I'd really like to be able to do, is define a multi-line regexp, that matches 3 or 4 lines out of it (Device Symmetrix Name, Symmetrix ID, any one of the capacity entries, and the state of the SCSI-3 Persistent Reserve:) and then allows me to do some manner of 'foreach loop'.
So far, I've figured I can just do a line by line 'foreach', and set variables based on matching particular lines: 
my $symm_id;
foreach ( `symdev list -v` )
{
  if ( m/Symmetrix ID/ ) 
  {  
     $symm_id = ( m/Symmetrix ID\s+:\s+(\d+)/ );
  }
}

[download]
That sort of thing. But that seems ... well, just rather inelegant really, when I'm pretty sure I can do multi-line regexps. I just can't quite get my head around how to turn at multi-line RE into 'something useful' for a 'foreach' loop, with multiple values.
I've found the 'm' flag on the pattern match, and can knock together something that matches a single record. 
my $text_to_parse = `symdev list -v`;

my ( $dev, $sym, $config, $SCSI3 ) = 
     ( $text_to_parse =~ m/Device Symmetrix Name\s+\:\s+([A-F0-9]+).*S
+ymmetrix ID\s+\:\s+(\d+).*Device Capacity.*Cylinders\s+\:\s+(\d+).*SC
+SI-3 Persistent Reserve\s+\:\s+(\w+)/m );

print "$dev, $sym, $config, $SCSI3\n";

[download]
Well, approximately - that's not quite what I want to do, as the greedy matches will eat the intervening chunks of the command output. But essentially, I want to do that 'per record'. Given the output of this particular command generates around 400Mb, I may end up dumping it to a file first.

In reply to Multiple line records from a command string by Preceptor

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