need perl help

[thelactator]

Hi, I'm new to this message board, and I suck at perl, so if anybody could help, it would be much appreciated.
OK, here's my problem.

I have a list of data in an input file that looks like this:
iep184:30201:222::/showme4/iep184:/usr/lbin/tcsh

The first portion, the iep184 part, is the user ID. I need to go through the list and get all user IDs that start with 'c' and end with '1'.

Any ideas? I think I have to use a split of some sort, but I'm not really sure how that works. Thanks for any help.

[SpookyEddy]

Sounds like you have the general idea, you could just split the line around : and then check the first field against a simple regexp to see if it matches you criteria. I can hack together some super ugly code for you when I get home if you want, but be warned that I also suck at Perl

Regards

eddy

[SpookyEddy]

Ok first quick attempt that seems to basically work, but I could be horribly wrong (so please test on a non important file).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
#### DISCLAIMER ###############
#
# Standard warnings, blah blah
# This code was written by a man with the IQ of a punch drunk monkey.
# I accept no responsibility for loss of data, life or sanity.
# 
###############################

use strict;

my $usage = <<EOT;
Usage: $0 [filename]
EOT

#do some rather shody checking on no. of args
if (@ARGV != 1) { die $usage }
my $file = shift;

#open an input file
open(FILE, $file) or die "Can't open input: $!";

#step over each line in the file
while(<FILE>){ 
        #split line up into an array
	my @line= split(/:/, $_);
        #print first element of array if it matches regexp
	if($line[0] =~ /^c(.*)1$/){ print "$line[0]\n" }
}

#Tidy up after reading
close(FILE);

#### The madness ends here ####

I will spend a few minutes later cleaning it up a bit and hunting down any major bugs, but you get the general idea.

Regards

eddy

[thelactator]

Damn....you kick ass man...I can't thank you enough. One question, what does EOT do? Thanks again.

[SpookyEddy]

It just lets me read all the info before the last EOT into the variable, handy for writing stuff like multi-line help info you want printing to STDOUT. This would work just as well.....

my $usage = "Usage: $0 [filename]"

Anyway, hope it works and you are more than welcome. Any problems just shout and I will see if I can fix it.

Later

eddy

[thelactator]

kick ass and chew bubblegum...thanks again mon frere.