Question

Sorry, if this to verbose, but I have a perl script that is partly working. I have a regular expression that extracts either foo|bar and a prefix on a string given. But the problem is my strings are also FILE NAMES which I also want to open and retrieve its contents like locale_col.dat.2010120813.png (see Expected Output below).

The output now looks like this:

Content:/home/myhome/col/[e-mail]
Key1:foo:Key2:col
Content:/home/myhome/col/.my_file_del.dp1.bar.net
Key1:bar:Key2:col
Content:/home/myhome/jab/[e-mail]
Key1:foo:Key2:jab
Content:/home/myhome/jab/.my_file_del.dp1.bar.net
Key1:bar:Key2:jab

I need help tweaking this so that in one pass I can read the list of strings (file names from FileList.txt), extract particular values from the file name path (using regex) and open the file name for its contents. I hope that makes sense or am I looking at breaking this into 2 perl scripts? Thanks for your input.

Code (WIP):

open FILE, "< /home/myname/FileList.txt";
while (<FILE>) {
 my $line = $_;
   chomp($line);
      print "Content:$_"; #This is just printing the filenames. 
                #I want to get the contents of those file names instead. Stuck here.
      if ($line =~ m/home\/myname\/(\w{3}).*[.](\w+)[.].*/){
         print "Key1:$2:Key2:$1\n";
      }
}
close FILE;

Contents of FileList.txt:

/home/myname/col/[e-mail]
/home/myname/col/.my_file_del.dp1.bar.net
/home/myname/jab/[e-mail]
/home/myname/jab/.my_file_del.dp1.bar.net

Example content of one of the listed files: (which I need help here with to extract)

$ cat [e-mail] 
locale_col.dat.2010120813.png

Expected Output:

Content:locale_col.dat.2010120813.png
Key1:foo:Key2:col
...
..

Answer 1

Here is a way to do it:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# ALWAYS these 2 lines !!!
use strict;
use warnings;

my $file = '/home/myname/FileList.txt';
# use 3 args open and test openning for failure
open my $FILE, '<', $file or die "unable to open '$file' for reading: $!";
while (my $line = <$FILE>) {
    chomp($line);
    print "Content:$line\n"; #This is just printing the filenames. 
    #I want to get the contents of those file names instead. Stuck here.
    if ($line =~ m#home/myname/(\w{3}).*[.](\w+)[.].*#) {
        open my $file2, '<', $line or die "unable to open '$file' for reading: $!";
        while(my line2 = <$file2>) {
          print $line2;
        }
        close $file2;
        print "Key1:$2:Key2:$1\n";
    }
}
close $FILE;