The only thing I could thing of would be removing rows where there where a specific number of zeros are in the row, but that’s not going to help me in the long run.

So what are the criteria for filtering the lines? Should all be preserved that start with ISNAUTH?

We can help you to implement something when you tell us what you want to do, but we don't know your business and can't help you if you can't even give us a description in natural language.

Oh geez sorry about that. No the first column does not matter. It's the remaining columns that I care about, I only want to see something that has values greater than zero consistently. For instance let’s say there are 15 rows and the first 5 are zero and within the last 10, 8 have values greater than zero.

Ok, then the first step is to parse the file. That's been done many times before, and you should re-use such a solution, like Text::CSV or Text::CSV_XS.

Then you have each row as an array, and you only have to iterate over them and check the condition you described.

So do it, and when you run into problems come back with more specific questions.

Perhaps you could discard any lines where the number of zeros exceeds some threshhold that you choose. This will not check for adjacent non-zero values but may be sufficient for your needs.

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $csvFH, q{<}, \ <<EOD or die qq{open: <<HEREDOC: $!\n};
JOBINIT,2,11,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
INSAUTH,5,7107,4,9343,5,7716,1,0,3,254,1,0,8,5655,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
INVPSWD,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
INSAUTH,192,440,192,440,188,450,180,450,189,447,192,440,192,440,188,45
+0,152,438,0,0,36,400,192,440
PWDEXPR,4,222,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
INSAUTH,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,5,7107,4,9343,5,7716,1,0,3,254,1,0,8,5655
UNDFUSER,1,0,1,0,3,4199,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
EOD

READFILE:
while( <$csvFH> )
{
    chomp;
    {
        no warnings q{numeric};
        next READFILE if 15 <= grep $_ == 0, split m{,};
    }
    print qq{$_\n};
}

close $csvFH or die qq{close: <<HEREDOC: $!\n};
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The output.

INSAUTH,5,7107,4,9343,5,7716,1,0,3,254,1,0,8,5655,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
INSAUTH,192,440,192,440,188,450,180,450,189,447,192,440,192,440,188,45
+0,152,438,0,0,36,400,192,440
INSAUTH,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,5,7107,4,9343,5,7716,1,0,3,254,1,0,8,5655
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I hope this is helpful.

Update: Fixed code formatting problem caused by a TAB and changed 0s to zeros for readability.

I've never used grep before and it seems to have been what I was looking for all along. I changed your script a little but this is what did. I added an option when I run the script to be $occurance because it's not going to be the same number every time. Thanks a ton for everyones help.

open IN, '<'.$inFlNm or die "Unable to open >$inFlNm< : $!\n";
READFILE:
while( <IN> )
{
    chomp;
    next READFILE if $occurance > grep $_ != 0, split m{,};
    print OUT qq{$_\n};
}
close IN;
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As moritz pointed out, you must know what concepts data represent to decide on what is important, e.g. a series of 0-s might be useless as suggested by you, when in sound silence-finding application it is crucial.

My advice is to try a little bit looking what might be promissing for you. Experiment with regular expressions filtering and see it obtained results are interesting. If so, go on and filter/ group/ sort more, ad infinitum. Something like

perl -ne 'print if /^INSAUTH\b/'
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would produce the output you mention.

Further, Text::CSV is a possible improvement on data analysis preparations.

It's not a direct answer to your question, which I think people have already commented on -- but once that you've pared down the list, you might want to consider making some sort of visualization of the line, so that you can quickly scan it visually and see what might be worth investigating further.

For the data that you're dealing with, I'd probably look at using sparklines -- there's a few CPAN modules to generate them.

Then, you can look at a page of graphs, and see which ones are stable / going up / random / etc.

Along the same lines, you could always simply sort the different lines into two different output files if you are worried about record keeping. For instance, once you decide how you want to filter/screen the data (probably by one of the methods discussed in the previous posts) you could put a simple if-else check to send the 'consistent' data lines to a file named "good_data.csv" and the 'inconsistent' data lines to a file named "discarded_data.csv" (or whichever names you like) so that you can review the discarded data at a later time if need be, or recover any lines that were filtered incorrectly. This also might help you find any errors or bugs in you code later on as you test it more thoroughly.

I am thinking something along these lines (pseudocode) (in case you aren't terribly familiar with syntax):

open INPUT, "name_of_input_file" or die: $!;
open GOOD_OUTPUT, ">good_data.csv" or die $!;
open BAD_OUTPUT, ">discarded_data.csv" or die $!;

while(my $line = <INPUT>){
    chomp $line;
    if(data_meets_good_condition){
        print GOOD_OUTPUT "$line\n"; 
    }else{
        print BAD_OUTPUT "$line\n";
    }
}
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That's a little rudimentary (and verbiose if you are a fan of golf) and needs an appropriate logical check in the if condition, but the primary idea is the if-else check, that way you don't totally wipe data by accident. Again, in terms of filtering the data, some of the methods discussed above are probably better.