in reply to Best way to compare two files

We need a sample of the data since there are conditions on which we will not be checking diff's. However I would suggest something like the following.

#!/perl use strict; use warnings; my @months = qw(January February March April May June July August September October November December); open(FIRST, "<first.file") or die "$!"; open(SECOND, "<second.file") or die "$!"; #if the files aren't huge you can slurp and comapre arrays my @first = <FIRST>; my @second = <SECOND>; close(FIRST); close(SECOND); open(DIFF, ">diff.file) or die "$!"; for(my $i = 0; $i < $#first; $i++) { my $is_date = 0; foreach(@months) { if($first[$i] =~ m{$_\s*\d{1,2}}) { $is_date = 1; last; } } if(!$is_date) { if($first[$i] ne $second[$i]) { print DIFF, "Difference found @ line: ".$i."\n"; print DIFF, "File 1: ".$first[$i]."\n"; print DIFF, "File 2: ".$second[$i]."\n"; print DIFF, "----------------------------\n"; } } } close(DIFF);

Grygonos