in reply to Re^6: Program unsuspectingly dies with no reason why.
in thread Program unsuspectingly dies with no reason why. -FIXED!

When you call a sub with parameters, those parameters arrive at the sub in the special array, @_. The usual practice is to copy the elements of that array immediately upon entering the sub.

sub foo { my ( $x, $y ) = @_; # ... }

Sometimes that's done this way:

sub foo { my $x = shift; my $y = shift; # ... }

In that case, rather than just copying, shift is actually pulling items off the array (which are then copied).

In each of these, you can call foo( 'hello', 'world' ), and $x will take the value 'hello' while $y takes the value 'world'. If you call foo( $howdy, $doody ), the variables $howdy and $doody won't be visible inside foo, but their values will be in $x and $y.

In your particular case, you're trying to print $removeq immediately upon entering the sub without grabbing the arguments first. The cleanthefile sub doesn't see the $removeq of the caller directly. It just gets a copy via the @_ array. (The fact that it doesn't have a variable by that name is what the "Global symbol "$removeq" requires explicit package name" error is about.)

It actually does take a copy later, on this line:

my ( $sourcefile, $removeq )= @_;

...but you're trying to print before that.

What I'd recommend, to start, is to get rid of that line, and put this at the very start of the sub:

my ( $removeq ) = @_;

At that point, I think the problem you may have is that $sourcefile doesn't have a value. I don't see where that value might come from, so I don't know how to advise you on how to fix that.

If you're interested in the gory details of sub calls in Perl, see perlsub.

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Re^8: Program unsuspectingly dies with no reason why.
by misconfiguration (Sexton) on Feb 15, 2008 at 18:07 UTC
    Call to sub-routine
    my $removeq = $remove; my $sourcefile = "/u/ccsys/CC_print.printers"; my $tempfile = "/u/ccsys/CC_print.printers.bkp_mkpq"; &cleanthefile( $removeq, $sourcefile, $tempfile );

    sub cleanthefile { my @filehandles; my ( $sourcefile, $removeq, $tempfile ) = @filehandles; # Keep a dedicated backup of CC_print.printers if (-e "/root/CC_print.printers.bkp" ) { `cp -R $filehandles[1] $filehandles[2]`; # create a temporary file if (-T ne "$filehandles[2]") { system("touch /u/ccsys/CC_print.printers.tmp"); } # extract lines from $sourcefile which do NOT have the string to + remove # note that the \' inserts ticks so that strings with spaces can + work, too if ( -T "$filehandles[2]") { # system ("cat $sourcefile \| grep -v $removeq $sourcefile > $ +tempfile"); `grep -v $filehandles[0] $filehandles[1] /dev/null /dev/null > + $filehandles[2]`; sleep 1; print "Waiting to unlink..\n"; # delete source file, then rename working file unlink($filehandles[1]); rename( $filehandles[2], $filehandles[1] ); system("rm -rf $filehandles[2]"); } } else { system("touch /u/ccsys/CC_print.printers.bkp"); system("cp -R $filehandles[1] /root/CC_print.printer.bkp"); print "Please re-run the program, had to create a backup\n"; } }
    I think you've got me on the right path Kyle, I can actually print the array of elements "@filehandles". It comes out in a order queuename, sourcefile, tempfile. Thanks so much for the help!