Shell Programming and Scripting

I guess thats a real help now... Could you please add a few concepts to that code so that I can understand it a little more? (I'm sorry... I'm sorry)

Let me try my best ! If not let me know

so in your php code, you have to add a query statement like
select ip1, trace1 from iptables;

>>>I suppose you would open a cursor to iterate over the result set of the above query.<<<

for every iteration of the cursor over the result set, write the output to a file.

so you would have output like,
<col1_output>, <col2_output>

write the above output to a file.

After the looping over the result set.

Do some system command over the perl script with the output filename obtained above

( am not sure of the syntax in php )

Code:

$cmd = "run.pl " . $filename " > output.txt";
system($cmd);

now the result should there in the file output.txt

these are more or less like a samples, please modify it according to php.

On second thoughts, I could get the perl script to run I've given it a sample input and it does work... (obviously it had to considering that it was written by you and not me hehe) However a few things:

I've created a file with the following contents:

A | B
B | C
C | D
A | E
G | H
I | K


And then ran the perl script on it... It gives me the following input:

first set:A
first set: D
first set:C
first set:E
first set:B
second set:H
second set:K
second set:I
second set:G

I have a few things to say/ask:
1. G,H and I,K aren't related so I,K shoud've been in Third Set...
2. I was trying for a way that would preserve the link information too...
I guess I wasn't clear in what I wanted... There could be many number of groups as such...