Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello all,

I'm trying to automate an if statement in my Perl script. The script opens an input file for reading, checks each line in the file for a particular substring, and if it finds the substring, writes it to an output file.

There are approximately 200 different input files. Each has the same format for each record, but the substring to check for is different for each one.

Suppose the Perl script name is test.pl. I'd like to have another file called test.txt. Each line in test.txt represents a test statement for a particular file.

For example:
testfile1.txt,\$$substrText = "string1"
testfile2.txt,\$$substrText = "string2"

The script test.pl checks the test.txt for the input file name and uses the corresponding test statement.

I tried using the eval function, but I can't get it to work. Is my design viable? Or is there a better way to do this?

Thanks for your help.

I realize you are asking for perl help, but since it's been about 10 years since I last did anything more than fix a sigil in perl, perhaps this sh script will help you out.

Code:

while IFS=, read fname key; do
    fgrep "$key" "$fname" >> output
done < test.txt

Happy New Year,
alister

I appreciate the suggestion, however, the script does have some other functionality. I would prefer to keep in in Perl, so I don't have to convert everything else.

Create a hash of key, value pair such that
key = filename
value = pattern to be searched in the file

parse the test.txt file and create a hash as said above

and before parsing each of the 200 files, get the pattern to be searched by passing the key => filename and use the pattern returned by the hash for testing