Shell Programming and Scripting

I need a perl script to find and replace a specific pattern in a file to a new line.

BAsically I have a single line data in a file with 10 mb to 200 MB. I want to put a new line based on a specific pattern to open the file in Excel / Access.

Following is the sample data in a file

*PAABCD *BA1Z8345 SAMPLE *FA00 *PA1Z TEST *FA00 DATA FROM THE LAB *BA1Z1000 research from the customer is endless

I want the out put to look like this

*BA1Z8345 SAMPLE *FA00 *PA1Z TEST *FA00 DATA FROM THE LAB
*BA1Z1000 research from the customer is endless


I tried the following perl script. It did not work properly. i need some help.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
my $startdir = '/home/mydir/';
my $find = '/*BA1Z';
my $replace = '\n*BA1Z';
my $doctype = 'txt';
print qq~Finding "$find" and replacing it with "$replace"\n~;
find(
 sub{
   return unless (/\.$doctype$/i);
   local @ARGV = $_;
   local $^I = '.bac';
   while( <> ){
      if( s/$find/$replace/ig ) { 
      print;
   }
  else {
      print;
  }
 }
}, $startdir);
print "Finished";

Uh, find() and File::Find is for searching the filesystems for files. You really don't need this (normally). You can instead do this from the command line:

Code:

find . -type f -name "*.bac" -print | xargs perl -p -i -e 'SCRIPT'

Here 'SCRIPT' is the tidbit of code you have there (with some meaningful bug fixes):

Code:

s/ (\*BA1Z.*)/\n$1/;

Now, before you go doing this, okay, perl's -i option will replace any file provided on the command line with whatever it does. So test it out first on a COPY of your files first. Because we're using find, make a new directory first, and run find within that directory:

Code:

cd project_dir
mkdir /tmp/project
cp *.bac /tmp/project/
cd /tmp/project
find ..... | perl ...