Not knowing Unix systems, I can't offer too much help. It would be very helpful to provide about 50+ lines of your output to show how you want the results of the program. I'm sure there are many improvements that could be made. For one, the line:

@Files=readdir(DIR);

It could be better stated:

my @Files = grep /\.desktop$/, readdir DIR;

grep will only pass *.desktop files to @Files

If you plan on writing Perl scripts, it would be advisable to declare your variables, (usually with 'my'), and to include the lines (at the beginning of your script):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

[download]

These will tell you of errors in your code syntax, spelling mistakes, etc. You will find nearly all the code on this site follow that method.

Update: It would also be helpful to see some of the input files, in paticular, lines that match Categories and Name and Exec.

One last thing - it would be nice to enclose these sample inputs and outputs in <readmore>. . .</readmore> tags so your post doesn't take so much space. :-)

In reply to Re: very new to perl; suggestions for porting this shell script to perl? by Cristoforo
in thread very new to perl; suggestions for porting this shell script to perl? by sinusoid

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.