Hello, I'm not too experienced with Perl and am never motivated to learn until I actually need something done, so sorry this isn't all eloquent and concise. :P

I have a list of URLs in a text file. I often add incomplete URLs or directory paths to the list in haste (for instance, missing http:// or the entire domain name itself), so I wrote up a perl script to add this automatically. I also want it all kept in lowercase to make it easier to grep, and I tend to copy lists of URLs that are not all lowercase. I originally used this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#This is c.pl

open (file, "petpages");
open NEW, ">", "petpages.new" or die $!;
while ($lines = <file>) {
$lines =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;
print NEW $lines;
}
close (file);
exec("rm petpages ; mv petpages.new petpages ; perl c2.pl");
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Which referred to this file:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#This is c2.pl

open (file, "petpages");
open NEW, ">", "petpages.new" or die $!;
while ($lines = <file>) {
print NEW "http://" . $lines;
}
close (file);
exec("rm petpages ; mv petpages.new petpages");
[download]

I thought just today to put it all into one file this way:

#!/usr/bin/perl

open (file, "petpages");
open NEW, ">", "petpages.new" or die $!;
while ($lines = <file>) {
$lines =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;
print NEW $lines;
}
close (file);
exec("rm petpages ; mv petpages.new petpages");
open (file, "petpages");
open NEW, ">", "petpages.new" or die $!;
while ($lines = <file>) {
print NEW "http://" . $lines;
}
close (file);
exec("rm petpages ; mv petpages.new petpages");
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This completed case conversion but failed to prepend http:// to each line as the pair of files did successfully.

With warning flag on, it threw me this:

Unquoted string "file" may clash with future reserved word at c.pl lin
+e 3.
Unquoted string "file" may clash with future reserved word at c.pl lin
+e 9.
Unquoted string "file" may clash with future reserved word at c.pl lin
+e 11.
Unquoted string "file" may clash with future reserved word at c.pl lin
+e 16.
Statement unlikely to be reached at c.pl line 11.
        (Maybe you meant system() when you said exec()?)
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I followed the meaning of this somewhat, and changed the handles (note file vs. file2):

#!/usr/bin/perl

open (file, "petpages");
open NEW, ">", "petpages.new" or die $!;
while ($lines = <file>) {
$lines =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;
print NEW $lines;
}
close (file);
exec("rm petpages ; mv petpages.new petpages");
open (file2, "petpages");
open NEW, ">", "petpages.new" or die $!;
while ($lines = <file2>) {
print NEW "http://" . $lines;
}
close (file2);
exec("rm petpages ; mv petpages.new petpages");
[download]

However, this also fails to prepend http://, and returns:

Unquoted string "file" may clash with future reserved word at c.pl lin
+e 3.
Unquoted string "file" may clash with future reserved word at c.pl lin
+e 9.
Statement unlikely to be reached at c.pl line 11.
        (Maybe you meant system() when you said exec()?)
[download]

I'm pretty much lost at this point. Any suggestions? Also, is exec() outdated?

Thanks,

Jack