Hi
This is in response to your previous mail .
This the code i have written ..but is seems to print the entire file and not the  lines with the user input data only.
print "\nenter the QAcategory from the categories below:\n";
print "QAcategory:\"script_basic\",\"tool_basic\",\"advanced:adv_studio,adv_msv,adv_mmmc\"\.\n";
open (INPUT, "runlist.txt") || die "cannot open runlist.txt for reading\n";
open (OUT ,">rundef.txt") || die "cannot open run_def.txt for writing\n";
 $qa_cat = <STDIN>;
while (<INPUT>){
 
  if ($_ =~ /^.*script_basic.*/) {
   $line = $_;
   print OUT "$line";
  }
  elsif ($_ =~  /^.*tool_basic.*/)
  {
   $line = $_;
   print OUT "$line";
 }

}

Could you plese go through and tell me where I have gone wrong.

Thanks

You are not making any use of the user entered information. You are printing all lines containing script_basic or tool_basic to the file ... which looks (your previous thread) rather like every line in the file!

There's a lot of excess manipulation of $_ which makes your code much more complex than needed, and regular expressions which have needless .* elements in them - I guess that you might have taught yourself just enough Perl to start to write the code, but perhaps not enough to complete the job with a working program yet?   We can help you via http://www.wellho.net/course/ppfull.html which can get you foing very quickly and efficiently!

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