Hi Perlmonks. I am new to Perl and I'm a little bit confuse about the error given when I compile my prog.

I have a prog that handle two kinds of input.
1.If number of argument passed=3 eg perl file.pl input.db output
It will check the input and search for age in the record and print it to the output file.
2.If number of argument passed=4 eg perl file.pl input.db tom output
It will check the input file, search people whose name tom and print the age to the output.

I have no problem with the search module.
But it's the problem with argv for the 2nd input. Every time I compile using perl prog.pl input.db tom output it always give error like:
Can't open tom:no such file or directory.
The same thing also happened if I use "tom" instead. What's wrong with my program?

Well,in my program I use while(<>) purposely to read other part of the module.
Here I include part of my working program. 

#!/usr/bin/perl   

use strict;
my $counter=1;
my $no='D000001';
my $name='';                #to save the name to be searched
my $result;
my $flag=0;

###checking the argument
if($#ARGV==1){ 
    print "First type of search\n";
    print "input: $ARGV[0]\n";
    print "output: $ARGV[1]\n";
    $result=">".$ARGV[1];   #get file for output
    $flag=1;
    check();
}

elsif($#ARGV==2){
    $name=$ARGV[1];
    print "Second type of search\n";
    print "input: $ARGV[0]\n";
    print "name : $name\n";
    print "output: $ARGV[2]\n";
    $result=">".$ARGV[2];   #get file for output
    $flag=2;
    check();
}
else {
    print "Invalid number of argument\n";}                            
+   

sub check{
# Read an entire record at a time
$/ = "//\n";  # each record separated by //\n
open(OUT,"$result") or die "Can't open $result.";    #open result for 
+output

while (<>){
# Read the entry
    print "$no\n";
    if($flag==1){
    ###print "$_";
    if(/AGE\s*(\d*)/){
            print OUT "RECORD NO\t$no\n";
            print OUT "AGE\t$1\n";}}
    if ($flag==2){
    search($name);}
    $no++;
}
close(OUT); 
}

sub search{
    print "search done\n";
    ##do some searching and other things 
    ##I didn't include the function
    ##since actually the code is very long, and it doesn't only do sim
+ple search
}

[download]
This is part of my input files: 
NAME Tom
AGE 21
//
NAME Janice
AGE 34
//
NAME Clarice
Age 45
//

[download]
Thank you in advanced.
Regards,

gdnew

In reply to about while() combine with ARGV by gdnew

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