I'm trying to parse some output generated by someone else's script, which uses the module, User::Utmpx. What I'm trying to do is breakup each line into three saved buffers, as demonstrated below:

Here's the actual data: 

 /var/adm/wtmpx begins on Fri Jun  7 16:40:21 2002 (488 days) ago
flexlm   FlexLM license manag Never logged in
m12345   Shmoe,Ronald K.  Last login Thu May  1 14:11:54 2003 (160 day
+s ago)
m54321   O'Schmoe,Karen D.     Last login Sun Sep 29 15:39:43 2002 (37
+4 days ago)
mresw3   Joe-Schmoe,Mira  Never logged in
mdsjlk   Schmoe, Robert L.    Last login Thu Sep 12 15:41:11 2002 (391
+ days ago)
oracle   OraSchmoe Oracle user   Never logged in
sshd     OpenSchmoe Privilege Se Never logged in
web      suitespot,httpd serv Never logged in

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The save buffers should get populated like this (for example): 
$1 = m54321
$2 = O'Schmoe,Karen D.
$3 = Last login Sun Sep 29 15:39:43 2002 (374 days ago)

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The problem I'm running into is dealing with the variable whitespace.

For thos interested, her's what I've tried, none of which works, obviously 

$line =~ /(\w+)\s+(.*?)\s{2,9}(.*?)/ ;

$line =~ s/(\w+)\s+(.*?)\s{2,9}(.*?)/$1 $2 $3/;

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....and a few other broken permutations of the above.

If anyone is interested, the context of what I'm doing is, we've got a program which will return a list comparable to the data above. This returns a list of users who have not logged into a given server for N days.

My plan is to run this program on each server in our infrastructure and mail the output to an email alias. This alias is going to be the script that I'm asking for help on. My intent is for this script to parse the incoming data and create a report of which machines each user has "old" user account on, and finally concatenate it to a log file.

The resultant data structure would contain:

<username>
<server 1> <last login>
<server 2> <last login>
<server 3> <last login>

....and so on.

Edit by thelenm: fixed a broken code tag

In reply to more than one whitespace char as word anchor by blink

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