In what way does your code not work? Are blue flames coming out of your computer when you run it?

I would recommend to use a much smaller sliding window for debugging, so that you can see if the values coming out are correct.

Maybe this will help?

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Data::Dump qw[ pp ];
use List::Util qw[ sum ];
use constant WINDOW => 10;


my @data  = map int( rand 10 ), 1 .. 30;

my @mAves;
my @slide;
for my $dp ( @data ) {
    push @slide, $dp;
    shift @slide if @slide > WINDOW;
    push @mAves, sum( @slide ) / WINDOW if @slide == WINDOW;
}

print join ' ', @data;
print join '   ', @mAves;

__END__
C:\test>junk
3 8 8 2 5 5 0 3 8 3 2 3 2 3 5 4 8 7 5 4 6 3 1 6 3 6 0 7 3 3
4.5   4.4   3.9   3.3   3.4   3.4   3.3   4.1   4.5   4.2   4.3   4.7 
+  4.7   4.6   4.9   4.7   4.9   4.1   4.1   3.9   3.8
[download]

A less computationally intensive variant would be to directly maintain a $sum, to which you add/subtract individual values (instead of push/shift on an array, from which you then recompute the sum every time):

#!/usr/bin/perl -lw
use strict;
use constant WINDOW => 10;

#my @data  = map int( rand 10 ), 1 .. 30;
my @data = qw(3 8 8 2 5 5 0 3 8 3 2 3 2 3 5 4 8 7 5 4 6 3 1 6 3 6 0 7 
+3 3);

my @mAves;
my $sum = 0;
for my $i (0..$#data) {
    $sum += $data[$i];
    $sum -= $data[$i-WINDOW()] if $i >= WINDOW;
    push @mAves, $sum / WINDOW if $i >= WINDOW-1;
}

print join ' ', @data;
print join '   ', @mAves;

__END__
3 8 8 2 5 5 0 3 8 3 2 3 2 3 5 4 8 7 5 4 6 3 1 6 3 6 0 7 3 3
4.5   4.4   3.9   3.3   3.4   3.4   3.3   4.1   4.5   4.2   4.3   4.7 
+  4.7   4.6   4.9   4.7   4.9   4.1   4.1   3.9   3.8
[download]

Establish windows of 10kb and calculate the average Recomb Rate
[download]

What does the "kb" refer to in this instance?    10,000 bits?    10,000 bytes?    10,000 bogons?

my @recomb_all = @{get_contents ($recomb_all)};

...

sub get_contents {
...
    return (\@contents);
}    # ----------  end of subroutine get_contents  ----------
[download]

Why return a reference to @contents to dereference it to copy to @recomb_all and not just copy it:

my @recomb_all = get_contents ($recomb_all);

...

sub get_contents {
...
    return @contents;
}    # ----------  end of subroutine get_contents  ----------
[download]

my $length = (scalar @recomb_all) - 1;
[download]

$length is not actually the "length" of any thing, you are using it as the last index of the array @recomb_all, which could more simply be written as $#recomb_all or -1.

        @{$contents[$x]} = split /\s+/;
[download]

There is no need for an $x variable there:

        push @contents, [ split ];
[download]

...definitely bogons...LOL!

thanks to all...but I still have problems in the sliding window part
Maybe I didn't explain it ok. What I want is to group the first column of the file in windows of 10 kbases (DNA positions) and calculate the average of column 2 for each window.

BrowserUK and Eliya: your idea works fine but it doesn't take into account the positions in column 1...and I'm stuck trying to use it.
Any idea?
Thanks!

but it doesn't take into account the positions in column 1

Sorry, I'm still not sure what you want (and it's a little diffficult to infer it from code which - as you state - doesn't work).

Are you saying the positions in column 1 are meant to represent indices in some sparse array, with all unspecified positions (such as 12498249..12512574, etc.) implicitly having a value of zero, or what?

I think it would help if you could come up with some simplified (but sufficient/complete) sample input (say using a window size of 3) together with the desired output values.

Thanks Eliya
Here's the simplified sample set


position     value
1    1
10    3
30    1
40    2
60    2
[download]

And here the output for window size of 30


1-30   1.666666667
31-60  2
[download]