Your use strict; statement is embedded in a comment line, and is therefore not in effect. Put it on its own line, and you will get compile errors regarding OUT and $OUT.

Using the following:

• use strict and warnings
• open
• perlcritic

use strict;
use warnings;

my $fin  = "SELECTDAT2";
my $fout = "myfile";
open my $ih, '<',  $fin  or die "cannot open $fin for reading, $! ";
open my $oh, '>',  $fout or die "cannot open $fout for writing, $! ";
while (<$ih>) {
    print $oh "NO", "\n", " 'SOURCE' ", "SEC", "Q", "SEC", "\n", "LONG
+", "LAT", "DEPTH", "GAP";
}
close $oh;
close $ih;
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velocitymodel:

You've already gotten some help on your coding problems. You also asked about putting the data in a different order, so here are a couple hints.

If you're going to print the records in a different order, you can't print them the instant you see them. Instead, you'll need to store them so you can rearrange them. Something like this can let you store the information:

my @records;
while (<IN>) {
    # Write a parse_record subroutine to return the variables you want
    my ($NUM, $SEC, $LONG, $LAT) = parse_record($_);

    # Stick your variables into an array for later use
    push @records, [ $NUM, $SEC, $LONG, $LAT ];
}
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Then, you can rearrange the records using some function, like sort:

# Sort by LONG (index 0=NUM, 1=SEC, 2=LONG, 3=LAT)
my @sorted_recs = sort { $$records[$a][2] <=> $$records[$b][2] } @reco
+rds;
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Finally, you can print your records once you've sorted them.

for my $rec (@sorted_recs) {
   # pull the variables from the current record
   my ($NUM, $SEC, $LONG, $LAT) = @$rec;

   print "Num=$NUM, Sec=$SEC, Long=$LONG, Lat=$LAT\n";
}
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To understand what's going on, be sure to read the documentation, such as perldsc, perlsyn, etc.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

"I wish to pick certain pieces of information from each line..."

My file is on another computer and this file contains over 17000 seismic events recorded from stations. This is what an event would look like in my file.

The first line is year, month, day, the origin of the quake in hrs, min., sec., the lat., long, depth, magnitude at 3 different places, the no of stations recording the event, the azimuthal gap, dmin, rms, erh, erz, quality, source, other mags, location/ comments. This would look like this in the file;  10 11 01 1127 47.7 44.798 111.367 9.4 .8 2.2 0.0 19 91 0.10 0.4 0.5 b MBMG 0.0 0.0 0.0 7.7 km SSW of Hebgen Dam

that would be the first line. The other lines contain the actual event data. I want to pick pieces of data from each of these columns of data and sort it into a format for a new file to be run through another program. I don't know how to declare variables when the information is in columns. How do I call the value for the number of stations from that line of code.

split the line on whitespace and store the results in an array. If the number of stations is the 5th token on the line, access it like this:

my @tokens = split;
my $num_st = $tokens[4];
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Dear frd, Read the man page of Open command.

here I have posted the correct code. Check it.

   use strict;
use warnings;


$a = "test", $b = "myfile";
open(IN, $a) || die "cannot open for reading,  $! ";
open(OUT,">$b") || die "cannot open for writing, $! ";                
+                                                                     
+                                                          
while (<IN>)
{
    print OUT "NO", "\n", " 'SOURCE' ", "SEC", "Q", "SEC ", "\n", "LON
+G", "LAT", "DEPTH", "GAP"
}
close (IN);
close (OUT);
[download]