ramlight,

Thanks for your post! I'm having the best success with your suggestion, some others caused perl to crash. :(

I pasted the snippet into my script ...

# while not eof
# =============
while ($line = <INPUT>) {

($date, $time, $ampm, $filesize, $filename) = split(" ", $line);

# remove commas from $filesize string
# ===================================
$filesize =~ s/,//;
[download]

and it successfully removed the first comma. (below)

Results from gnome-terminal:

1572,727,014    IN11-135.E01
1223    IN11-135.E01.txt
1572,694,696    IN11-135.E02
1572,740,428    IN11-135.E03
1572,785,002    IN11-135.E04
1572,696,748    IN11-135.E05
1572,745,871    IN11-135.E06
1572,737,726    IN11-135.E07
1572,785,459    IN11-135.E08
1572,777,135    IN11-135.E09
1572,751,922    IN11-135.E10
1572,684,462    IN11-135.E11
1556,456,660    IN11-135.E12

Total Files: 13  Avg Size: 0
[download]

The first comma was removed from each number. Now I'm off to perldoc.perl.org to see how I can remove the remaining commas.

Thanks ... Allen.

The first comma was removed from each number.

The s/// operator by default removes only the first match. So:

my $var = "foobarfoobaz";
$var =~ s/foo//;
say $var;   # says "barfoobaz"
[download]

There are various flags you can include to alter its default behaviour though. One of the most useful is the "g" (global) flag...

my $var = "foobarfoobaz";
$var =~ s/foo//g;
say $var;   # says "barbaz"
[download]

Note that the slashes may be replaced with other characters, so you could equally write:

my $var = "foobarfoobaz";
$var =~ s@foo@@g;
say $var;   # says "barbaz"
[download]

Or even:

my $var = "foobarfoobaz";
$var =~ s{foo}{}g;
say $var;   # says "barbaz"
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... which some people might find more readable. Though note that there are a handful of characters (hash, question mark and single quote spring to mind) that trigger special behaviours here (perlop has more details).

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

Have another read of the answer roboticus gave you, paying particular attention to the 'g' flag of the substitution.

Cheers,

JohnGG