It really depends on what you mean by passing each line to another program: 1)Do you mean, call another program with each line as the arguments? or 2) Do you mean, pipe each line to another program's standard input? (or do you mean something altogether different?)

# 1

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $other_program = 'echo';
while(<>){
    chomp;
    system($other_program, $_);
}
__END__



# 2

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $other_program = 'tr [a-z] [A-Z]';
open(OTHER, "|$other_program") || die "Kant: $!";
while(<>){
    print OTHER $_;
}
close OTHER;
__END__
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Thanks for everyone's help...I'm where I need to be. There were some questions about what I'm wanting to with the data from the file. I would like to take each record of the file (one at a time) and pass that record as an argument to another perl script, shell script, etc. that performs data extraction based on the argument being passed in (i.e. zip code). Hope this clears up any of the confusion! Thanks- ep

Try this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

open (FILE, "file.txt") or die "arrrrgh...$!\n";

while (<FILE>) {
    print; 
    # pass to program here
}
close(FILE);
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Maybe:

open OUT,'|program' or die $!;
open IN,'file.txt' or die $!;
#if you don't need to process each line...I don't see why not printing
+ all the lines at once like:
print OUT <IN>;
#but if you must print one line at a time:
while(<IN>){
#do whatever you want with the line.
print OUT $_;
}
close OUT; close IN;
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