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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