The first thing you need to do is go out and get yourself a copy of the Lama ("Learning Perl") and read it, or read through some of the Perl documentation such as perlintro. You will also find a pile of good stuff in the Tutorials section.

Next, always start your scripts with strictures:

use strict; use warnings;

That will help pick up silly errors and typos. Often the errors won't make sense initially so you could throw use diagnostics; into the mix as well, or ask here. Your given code would be better written:

use strict; use warnings; use diagnostics; my $logName = 'logfile.txt'; open my $logIn, '<', $logName or die "Can't open $logName: $!\n"; while (defined (my $line = <$logIn>)) { ...; }

which uses strictures, the safer three parameter version of open, safer and better behaved lexical file handles, better failure diagnostics and a while loop instead of slurping the file.

True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re: Parsing a logfile. by GrandFather
in thread Parsing a logfile. by concept

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.