I have not dissected your code, and do not know what is causing the problem you describe, but I have a couple of general comments.

• Add some vertical whitespace! You have what appears to be a good amount of comments, but it could really use some empty lines to break things up. It makes me dizzy to try and discern the logical chunks.
• Always check the return status of open -- even when opening a file for input. On a related note, in your die on the output file's open call, you do not include $! in the output string. This is often very helpful.
• Perhaps instead of using a global bareword filehandle, you could use a lexically scoped, autovivified filehandle, which you pass into your subroutines as a normal argument?

Here's a quick example demonstrating these points:

  open my $fh, "<", $input or die "$input: $!";
  foo($fh);

  sub foo {
    my ($fh) = @_;
    my $line = <$fh>;
    print $line;
  }
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Hopefully one of these suggestions will lead you to find the problem on your own.

while(<IN>) {
  print;
}
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while(<IN> && 'perl rulez') {
  print;
}
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I wish I could ++ you again. I moved the additional test inside the while loop as an if, and got the output I desired. There are a few logic errors that need to be fixed, but at least the behavior makes sense to me now.

Thank you, thank you, and thank you again,
digger.

Have I misunderstood?

I originally started out with that solution in mind, but it seemed to get a little messy when passing the lines to a sub like I'm doing. I was hoping to just start reading where my main loop left off, and do all the chapter level processing in my handleSeps sub. Since I know I won't have any of the processes from steps 1 and 2 to deal with, I could bypass those, and just handle 3 seperately. It seems more "elegant" to me, and more maintainable in the future if I have to add more changes.

Thanks for your input,
digger

Use pseudocode to get a better general grasp of the problem.

First, restate your project description more accurately (in English). Only one of the three things you actually do when the current line is a chapter end. Here's the best I could make of it:

1. When the current line is a chapter end, insert a chapterization command.
2. In the first two pages of a chapter, change the paper output tray.
3. On the third page following the end of a chapter, insert a command to send the newly started chapter to the binder.

Then translate that to pseudocode. I don't really recommend using obscenely long variable and subroutine names, but the point is that you should factor out the little pieces so that you can look at the structure of the loops and conditionals all at once.

my $pages_this_chapter = 0;

while (<IN>)
{
  if (current_line_is_the_kdkhost_line()) { next }

  # Don't forget the special case
  #
  if (current_line_is_a_chapter_end() || $. == 1) {
    print OUT $chapterization_command;
    $pages_this_chapter = 0;
    next; # ???
  }

  if (current_line_starts_a_new_page()) {
    $pages_this_chapter++;

    if ($pages_this_chapter == 3)
      { print OUT $send_to_binder }
  }

  if ($pages_this_chapter <= 2) # 3?
    { change_the_paper_output_tray() }

  print OUT;
}
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That's not exactly what you want, but you get the idea. Now fill in the blanks. Remember that $_ and $. are visible everywhere. (You may prefer to change your subroutines to accept the current line and/or line number as arguments instead of peeking at $_ and $. .)

sub current_line_is_the_kdkhost_line {
  m/^%KDKHost:/;
}

sub current_line_is_a_chapter_end {
  m!<</OutputType \(\)>>setpagedevice!;
}

sub current_line_starts_a_new_page {
  /%%BeginPageSetup/;
}

sub change_the_paper_output_tray {
  m!<</OutputType\(Stacker\)>>setpagedevice! and
  s/Stacker/top/;
}
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Apologies that I don't have time to completely review your code, but I noticed a few things upfront.

$end_chapter is initialized to 1 and always set to 1 by chapterize so that handleSeps will always get called on each line of input from the main loop.

In handleSeps $counter is initialized to zero and incremented only at %%BeginPageSetup, but in the same if clause if it hits 3, it is reset to 0. So, $counter never makes it past three, and handleSeps will only return at EOF.

Also, note that the first line of input (which is stored in $line) will never actually get printed to the output, as this only happens on the else clause of the main loop which is never hit.

Of course the real killer is the catch that <> only assigns to $_ in a while statement if it is the only thing inside the conditional. In the absence of that, and since $_ is not localized here, it will retain it's previous value -- The first line read from the file. This will be continously output (as $counter is not incremented) to your temp file.

If you are lucky enough that the first line of your input file contains %%BeginPageSetup or Output... then a slightly different string will be output to your temp file.

After that, the temp will grow as large as your filesystem permits (or until you hit ctrl-c)

Hope that helps....

Thanks for the analysis captain.

I found the first problem shortly after posting.

I found the second issue this morning when I was able to pick this little project up again.

Issue number 3 was the "real killer" as you say. I put my solution together, and couldn't see the side effects of other errors while this issue remained. Once kappa pointed out the underlying problem, I was able to solve the other issues pretty quickly.

Thanks again for taking the time to look at my code.
digger