Policy Name:            Backup_Monday
  Active:               Yes
  Type:                 Normal
   ----- more various garbage in between -----
Granular Restore Info:  No
  HW/OS/Client:  PC            Windows2003   ds1
                 PC            Windows2003   ds2
                 PC            Windows2003   ds3
                 PC            Windows2003   ds4
                 PC            Windows2000   ds5
                 PC            Windows2000   ds6
(blank line here)
(text file continues on to other policies in the file from here)
[download]

The description of the problem makes sense, but your guess about having a loop inside a loop is very muddled. And you still haven't shown any of your own code.

By way of a better explanation, your solution should be something called a "state machine", where at any given time your program is in one of a finite set of "states" (it seems like two states will suffice here). Whether or not you print a given line depends on what state you're in, and there are certain lines that will cause a change of state. Make sense? Here's pseudo-code, which is pretty close to a perl solution:

initial state is "0";

while there's a line that you've read from the file
{
 set state  to "1" if the current line contains "HW/OS/Client"

 print the current line if the current state is "1" (true)

 set state to "0" if the current line is blank (contains only white-sp
+ace)
}
[download]

That should do what you want. Let us know if you have trouble turning that into perl code. (It shouldn't be hard.)

graff, Here's all the code I have so far:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $PolicyName = "";
my $PolicyType = "";
my $ActivePolicy = "";
my $ClientServer = "";

open(INFILE, '<mas01_policy_dump.txt');

while(<INFILE>) {
    if ($_ =~ "Policy Name") {
        $PolicyName = $_;
        #print $line;
    }
    if ($_ =~ "Policy Type") {
       $PolicyType = $_;
       }
    if (($_ =~ "Active") && ($_ =~ "yes")) {
        $ActivePolicy = $_;
        print $PolicyName;
        print $PolicyType;
        print $ActivePolicy;
        }
    if ($_ =~ "HW/OS/Client") {
        while ($_) {
           next if /^$/;
           $ClientServer = $_;
           print $ClientServer;
           next;
           }
    }
next;
}
[download]


Sorry, but I'm reading books and searching the internet while trying to learn about perl and write this script to do what I need done. So, I'm reading, writing, testing, fixing, reading, writing, testing, fixing.....it's a never ending cycle until I figure out how to do what I need done in Perl. I used to write Unix scripts but that's been years ago. I'm learning perl now because some of the production scripts I now have to help support are in Perl.

And here is a snippet of what the text in the file looks like:

Policy Name:       BKUP_U_BOX01

  Policy Type:         Standard
  Active:              yes
  Effective date:      06/22/2010 11:55:42
  Client Compress:     no
  Follow NFS Mounts:   no
  Cross Mount Points:  no
  Collect TIR info:    no
  Block Incremental:   no
  Mult. Data Streams:  no
  Client Encrypt:      no
  Checkpoint:          no
  Policy Priority:     0
  Max Jobs/Policy:     Unlimited
  Disaster Recovery:   0
  Collect BMR info:    no
  Residence:           box08-hcart-robot-acs-0
  Volume Pool:         box01_Onsite
  Server Group:        *ANY*
  Keyword:             (none specified)
  Data Classification:       -
  Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:    no

Granular Restore Info:  no
  HW/OS/Client:  Solaris       Solaris10     box01
                 Solaris       Solaris10     box07
                 Solaris       Solaris10     box08

  Include:  ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES

  Schedule:          weekly_onsite
    Type:            Full Backup
    Maximum MPX:     1
    Synthetic:       0
    PFI Recovery:    0
[download]

You can use the range operator on the command line, like so:


perl -ne "print if m{^\s*HW/OS/Client:} ... m{^\s*$}" mas01_policy_dum
+p.txt
[download]


which tells Perl to go through every line of the given file and print lines in-between (inclusive) two lines which match:

• first line matches "HW/OS/Client", may begin with optional whitespace
  
• last line matches a blank line
  

OK....I got things working a bit better now. Thought I'd post the code here for others to view in case I confused way too many people. :-)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $PolicyName = "";
my $PolicyType = "";
my $ActivePolicy = "";
my $ClientServer = "";

open(INFILE, '<mas01_policy_dump.txt');

while(<INFILE>) {
    chomp;
    if ( /^\s*$/ ) { # true when the current line is blank
        next; # No need to process blank lines here
        }
    if ( /------------------------------------------------------------
+/) {
        # Print all the seperators
        print "$_\n";
        next; # No need for further checks
        }

    if ($_ =~ "Policy Name") {
        $PolicyName = $_; # New Policy, pay attention
        next;
    }
    if ($_ =~ "Policy Type") {
       $PolicyType = $_;
       next;
       }
    if ($_ =~ "Active") {
        if ($_ =~ "yes") {
            # Active Policy, we want this stuff
            $ActivePolicy = $_;
            print "$PolicyName\n";
            print "$PolicyType\n";
            print "$ActivePolicy\n";
            next;
            }
        else {
            # Inactive policy, skip ahead
            while(<INFILE>) {
                if ( /------------------------------------------------
+------------/) {
                    print $_;  # CRLF included since no chomp
                    last;
                    }
                }
            }
        }

    # So should be active policy and non blank line from here
    if ($_ =~ "HW/OS/Client" ) {
        # Mutliline!!
        print "$_\n";
        while(<INFILE>) {
            if ( /^\s*$/ ) { last; } # Blank line = end of lines
            chomp;
            print "$_\n";
            }
        next; # I should hit this line only when $_ is blank
        }
}
[download]


Now, I'm not done with this just yet, but I wanted to post the code that I have so far that got me through the primary issue I was dealing with at the time.

Thanks,
Dennis