Apologies for not answering your question, but I was distracted by your "blasphemous coding technique" (as you put it) - or as I'd put it - bad indentation, style, etc. Please don't place 4 separate statements on the same line!

my ($title) = /title=(".*?")/;  ($title) =~ s/"/'/g;       ($title) =~
+ s/^\s+//g;($title) =~ s/\s+$//g;
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Please properly indent things like for loops and other blocks. This is just one example, but you really lose a lot of information/visual cues that can help make heads or tails out of your code.

foreach $i(0 .. $#fields) {
s/^\s+//, s/\s+$// for $fields[$i];
#print "\$fields[$i]:$fields[$i] \n";
}
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Honestly, it's not that difficult to clean things up manually - but if you just can't coerce yourself into some structure, at the very least, please run your code through perltidy. I (and perhaps many others) won't read your code, much less help you on it, otherwise.

$,=42;for(34,0,-3,9,-11,11,-17,7,-5){$*.=pack'c'=>$,+=$_}for(reverse s
+plit//=>$*
){$%++?$ %%2?push@C,$_,$":push@c,$_,$":(push@C,$_,$")&&push@c,$"}$C[$#
+C]=$/;($#C
>$#c)?($ c=\@C)&&($ C=\@c):($ c=\@c)&&($C=\@C);$%=$|;for(@$c){print$_^
+$$C[$%++]}
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Thanks for telling me. I'm using a perl editor, so the loops were obvious to me. I've made it a bit eye friendlier.

The blasphemy I was referring to was my excessive use of loops, lack of subs, etc.

Commenting is helping me. There are still a couple of problems.

#!usr/bin/perl
open LINKFILE, "linksource.dat"  || die "no such file here";
while (<LINKFILE>) {
    #memorize title, then url;
    my ($title) = /title=(".*?")/;
    ($title) =~ s/"/'/g;
    ($title) =~ s/^\s+//g;
    ($title) =~ s/\s+$//g;
    my ($url) = /(component.*")/;
    ($url) = '"/' . $url;
    ($url) =~ s/"/'/;
    my $match = 0;
    open SQL, "mark.sql";
    while (<SQL>) {
        @fields = split /,/ , $_ ;
        foreach $i(0 .. $#fields) {
            s/^\s+//, s/\s+$// for $fields[$i];
                                        }
        print "\$fields[2]:|$fields[2]|   \$title:|$title| \n"  if ($t
+itle eq "'Alternative Reds'");# monitor - stops after first A R hit??
        next unless ($fields[2] eq $title);  #skip it if it doesnt mat
+ch
        next if ($fields[4] eq "'separator'"); #skip it if its not an 
+URL
        push @used, $fields[0];
        ($fields[3] = $url) if ($fields[2] eq $title);
         my $sqlout = join "," , @fields;
         open NEWFILE , ">>newsql.sql";
        print NEWFILE "$sqlout \n";
        close NEWFILE;
        last;
                     } # finished going through the SQL
    }  #finished cycling through linkfile
close SQL;
close LINKFILE;

#Now go through each record, check to see if the index field matches t
+he used array, and if not, write the record

open SQL, "mark.sql";
while (<SQL>){
 @fields = split /,/ , $_ ;

#compare first record element with the used array
 foreach (@used) {
    next if $fields[0] eq $_; # if the record has been used, dont use 
+it again
    print "\$used:|$_| \$fields[0]:|$fields[0]| \n"; #monitor
    my $sqlout = join "," , @fields;
    open NEWFILE , ">>newsql.sql";
    print NEWFILE  "$sqlout";
    push @used, $fields[0];
    close NEWFILE;
    last;
                       }
             }
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What chargrill said...

A link to perltidy and its accompanying tutorial.

HTH,

planetscape

Enough about the layout, let's get to the logic. I think that you would do much better to separate the reading of the LINK file from the reading and modification of the SQL file. Read the LINK file first, constructing a hash table with the titles as the keys and the corresponding URLs as the values then close that file. After that go on to read the SQL file in a separate loop, modifying it and writing a new SQL file (both modified and unmodified lines) as you go.

TIPS

Always do

use strict;
use warnings;
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at the top of your scripts to enforce some discipline and to catch typo slips.

Comment your code generously and help the comments to stand out by preceding them with a blank line.

Try using the three argument form of open to avoid problems like writing to a file that should only have been read. You correctly tested for the success of your opens but it would be useful to include the operating system error, $!, in the die message.

I would try to avoid all of the messing about transforming the title and URL from the LINK file by crafting a better regular expression to pull out just what you want. I would also leave off including the quote marks until the output stage. The following code illustrates the open and the regex, capturing the information in a hash reference

my $linkFile = q{linksource.dat};
open my $linkFH, q{<}, $linkFile
   or die qq{open: $linkFile: $!\n};

my $rhTitleToURL = {};
LINKLINE:
while (<$linkFH>)
{
    next LINKLINE
       unless m
       {(?x)
           title\s*=\s*"
           ([^"]+)
           .*?
           href\s*=\s*"
           ([^"]+)
       };
    my ($title, $url) = ($1, $2);
    $rhTitleToURL->{$title} = $url;
}

close $linkFH
   or die qq{close: $linkFile: $!\n};
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You are wasting effort when extracting your @fields from the SQL file. Firstly, split acts by default on $_ so you don't have to specify it, @fields = split /,/; would do. However you then have to waste time stripping leading and trailing spaces from each field. The first argument to split is a regular expression so if you include the spaces around the comma in the regex, they won't get into the fields in the first place. Like this

my @fields = split m{\s*,\s*};
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The modification of the SQL file probably ought to go like this:-

open old SQL file for reading
open new SQL file for writing
while loop reading old SQL line by line
    split line into fields
    if this is a line to be modified
        modify fields
        construct new line
        print to new SQL file
    else
        re-construct old line
        print to new SQL file
close files
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I hope you find this useful and I hope you take the criticisms of your code layout in the constructive spirit they are intended.

Cheers,

JohnGG

Update: Corrected indentation in code snippet caused by inadvertant TABs.