Hello, I am new to Perl and have spent about 15 hours (mostly on google, tutorials and bought a Perl book) trying to figure out what I assumed was a simple thing to do.

I have 3 files: host.file - which has IP addresses and possibly hostnames email.file - which is an output file that is updated when I am emailed about a failed ping. output.file - basically just used for debugging/logging

What I am trying to do is ping a list of hosts/IPs then email myself if the ping fails. So far I can get all of that to work. I run the script like every 5 minutes. The 'problem' is that I do not want it to email me every 5 minutes when it detects a failure, I would like it to add that IP to a list (email.file) then notice that I just emailed it and skip over it a few times, maybe for 60 minutes or something before it clears from the list and is available to be emailed again when the ping fails. I hope that makes sense.

In the code I commented out my failed attempts, and removed most of the Net::SMTP stuff just to clean up the code. The trouble area I assume is around the while (@efile = <eFILE>) { area.

Sorry about the sloppy code, I am new to coding, thanks, Sam.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use Net::Ping;
#use Net::SMTP;

sub email() {
print "emailed: $_\n";
print eFILE ("$_\n");
}

open(INFILE, "<", "host.file") or die("unable to open file: $!");
my @ip_array = <INFILE>;
chomp(@ip_array);

open(OUTFILE, ">", "output.file") or die("unable to write to file: $!"
+);
open(eFILE, "+<", "email.file") or die("unable to write to file: $!");
my @efile = <eFILE>;
chomp(@efile);

$p = Net::Ping->new();

foreach (@ip_array)
        {
          if($p->ping($_))
            {
              print OUTFILE ("$_ is responding to ping.\n");
            }else{
                  print OUTFILE ("$_ is NOT responding to ping.\n");
          #while (@efile = <eFILE>) {
            #if (@efile =~ $_) {
                #print "found $_ on the list.\n"
              #}else{
                  email()
                #}
            #}
        }    
        }
close(INFILE);
close(OUTFILE);
close(eFILE);
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