------file

vegeta-44
matriz-22
evac-500
fritzilldo-200
teenreality-15

------------
[download]

perl -pi.bak -e 's/(?<=vegeta-)(\d+)/$1 + 6/e' memberpoints.txt
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$hash{vegeta} += 6;
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If you know about reading and writing Perl files, try reading in the whole file, changing the part you want to change, then writing the whole file back to update it. Like this:

# Load in the whole file
open (FILE, "memberpoints.txt") or die "Can't read: $!";
while (<FILE>) {
    chomp;
    ($name, $number) = split "-";
    $field ($name) = $number;
}

# Change whatever you want
$field{'vegeta'} += 6;
# ..etc

# Write the whole file back (replacing what was there before)
open (FILE, ">memberpoints.txt") or die "Can't write: $!";
foreach (keys %field) {
    print FILE "$_-$field{$_}\n";
}
[download]

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer

Edited: Forgot to chomp the newline. Bad newline. Bad. Added the chomp in.

And here's a from the docs (perldoc db_file) hack to read-in your text and create a dbm:

use strict ;
use DB_File ;
use vars qw( %h $k $v ) ;   # hash, key value

tie %h, "DB_File", "memberpoints", O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0640, $DB_HASH
    or die "Cannot open file 'memberpoints': $!\n";

# Load in the whole file data file into the hash/dbm
open (FILE, "memberpoints.txt") or die "Can't read: $!";
while (<FILE>) {
  next unless /-/;
  chomp;
  my ($name, $number) = split "-";
  $h {$name} = $number;
}


# print the contents of the hash/dbm
while (($k, $v) = each %h) { 
  print "$k -> $v\n" 
}

untie %h ;
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Note: you'll do this once, then you need to write your update code along the lines of:

use strict ;
use DB_File ;
use vars qw( %h $k $v ) ;   # hash, key value

tie %h, "DB_File", "memberpoints", O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0640, $DB_HASH
    or die "Cannot open file 'memberpoints': $!\n";


# update
$h{vegeta} += 6;

# print the contents of the db (debuggin)
while (($k, $v) = each %h) { 
  print "$k -> $v\n" 
}


untie %h ;
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Very rough but its cold here and my fingers are getting too stiff to type.

Update: Fruit? it really was cutnpaste ...

a

If you're new to programming, I suggest you go read some books and play around with Perl and the examples from the book. You can't expect to be able to make a program that a company will use if you have little programming experience - the resulting program will most probably be unreliable, and perhaps even insecure.

There's all sorts of other things that come into play here: E.g. if it's a CGI program, it might be run multiple times simultaneously, and multiple instances might try to write to the same file before other instances are finished (race condition). You'll need to research 'file locking' (flock) if it's a CGI script.

If it's a(n interactive) program meant to be run by only one user, you won't need file locking.