re: Reading external file. Open files from listing and do a search and replace then continue...

From: FlashMX (FlashMX_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 11/30/04 

To: "beginners@perl.org" <beginners@perl.org>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 13:34:24 -0500

I've been able to read and output the external file containing the file listing.

I've been told to do a "foreach" Would this go after the "while" or in place of?

open READFILE, "< file.in" or die qq(Cannot open file "file.in": $!);
while ($line = <READFILE>) {
                print $line;
        }
}
close (READFILE);

Things have kinda changed in the last few days in the way I need to do my script. Previsouly I was reading in an external file. Checking for a certain match and then
replacing some text while at the same time writing the results out to a temoporary file. This all works great but I have to do another approach.

How would I do the following:

Read an external file which has a list of other external files listed within. Like this.

external file contents
-------------------------

S: 1 F: file1.txt
S: 2 F: file2.txt
S: 3 F: file3.txt
S: 4 F: file4.txt
S: 5 F: file5.txt

Then I need to open each file from the list one at a time and check for a certain string match. If found, do a search and replace and write the results out to a temoporary file
(file1.tmp). Then rename that file back to the original (file1.txt). Then continue to the next line until the end has been reached.

I can't figure out the logic for this. Can you help?

Thanks