Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Friends,

As my old friends knows, I'm old to shell script but very new to perl script, currently I'm writing
a PERL script with the following functionality:

I've multiple product directories, like BUSS, FIN, SALES, MKT etc., :
/export/home/GLK/BUSS,
/export/home/GLK/FIN,
/export/home/GLK/SALES,
/export/home/GLK/MKT
etc..,

Above all directories will have one report file with the same name 'missing_party.rpt'.

This report file contains a lot of information, out of which I need to extract
only the lines which has the pattern "My dear boss(.....some info...) Thanks".

I've to redirect only the above pattern line into a output file "/export/home/OUTPUT/output.txt"
by discarding the remaining line.

I've written the below script, with the help of google

#!/usr/bin/perl

use File::Find;
use strict;

my $directory = "/export/home/GLK";
my $out_filename = "/export/home/GLK/output.txt";

find (\&process, $directory);

sub process
{
my @outLines; #Data we are going to output
my $line; #Data we are reading line by line

# Only parse files that end in .html
if ( $File::Find::name =~ /\missing_party.rpt$/ ) {
open (FILE, $File::Find::name ) or die "Cannot open file: $!";
open( OUTFILE, "> " . $out_filename ) or die "Cannot open file: $!";

# print "\n" . $File::Find::name . "\n";
while ( $line = <FILE> ) {
$line =~ m/"My dear boss(.....some info...) Thanks"/ ;
push(@outLines, $line);
print ( OUTFILE @outLines );
}
close FILE;
close ( OUTFILE );
undef ( @outLines );
}
}

The problem with the above script is, I need to extract only the information "My dear boss(.....some info...) Thanks" from the entire line. But current code is extracting complete line.
I dont know how to implement it.....

Could any one help me ... also is it possible to fine tune the above code...? Even though I'm new, requirement is for the optimal code.

Thanks in advance... / Mysore Ganapati.

Maybe something like this (untested):

Code:

while ( $line = <FILE> ) {
    if ($line =~ s/^.*("My dear boss(.....some info...) Thanks").*$/$1/){
        push(@outLines, $line);
        print ( OUTFILE @outLines );
    }
}

Basically, you can do a regex replacement and also get a true/false return value from it at the same time. My regex above is intended to isolate the part you want and replace the entire string with it.

But, I need to extract only the string "My dear boss(.....some info...) Thanks" from the entire line which has the above string.
Still working on this, but I'm not able to find the solution yet...

My solution does exactly that. The bit inside the if statement does a substitution, stripping away all the extra parts before and after the part you want.

Code:

while ( $line = <FILE> ) {
   if ($line =~ m/"My dear boss (.+?) Thanks"/) {
      push(@outLines, $1);
   }
}
print OUTFILE @outLines;

Are there literal parentheses '()' in the line?

If not what is the exact formatting of the line?

Yes, there can be any literal charecters, including ().
In the string "My dear boss(.....some info...) Thanks" (...some information...) may be any thing. Also this string is only a part of line, these lines may be 'n' number in any file.
In the above case what could be the code?

Thanks for your try and help...

Can you post some of those lines so we can see exactly it is you are trying to parse?