tye...... thank you for having a look. I can see that you trying to get the data to dump.... I tried your line entry and ..... nothing dumped .... in short the code is running but not doing the calculation. As for data...... I am trying to do the calculation for a 10 entry average.... the test file is 31Kb of data.... more than sufficient for this small program. We should be able to get a 200 event average with that amount of data.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
       use strict;
       
       
       $my infile = shift;
       $my outfile = shift;
       
       open(IN, $infile) || die("Can't open input file $infile - $!");
       open(OUT, ">$outfile") || die("Can't open output file $outfile 
+- $!");

              my $text;
       my $text2;
       my @lines;
      
       while (<IN>) {
         push @lines;
         shift @lines if @lines > 10;
       }

       chomp(@lines);

       my @cols;
       my $total = 0;

       for (@lines) {
         @cols = split /:/;
        print "($cols[3]) $_";
         $total += $cols[3];
       }
       my $average = $total / (@lines || 1);
       

                # if no lines, avoid division by zero
         
          my $last = (split /:/, $lines[-1])[3];

       
 $text = "Average of column 3 for the last " .
                              scalar(@lines) . " days: $average\n";   
+    
  $text2 ="Last value in Col3 " . 
                              scalar(@lines) . "  $last\n";

      print OUT "$text\n";
      print OUT "$text2\n";

    
       close IN;
       close OUT ;
[download]

**** this is the best edited version till now.... have a look..... it would be easy to give up in frustration.... it's being able to do caculations like this .... is what scripting is all about... for me anyway. Especially when you can see ways of doing the work faster and simpler than in Excel .... once you get it coded right that is.. Joachim