hi every one, I need ur help for my program I need a perl script that will search for a word in a given file and a given line number so tht i can change the line for searching. Is it possible to code with perl. i tried a lot with grep ..but cant get the desired output. Any one can get me the code?? thanx in advance ravi hai

perl -ne 'print "$.\n" if /word/"'

hay thanx for the reply... Actually my aim is to display the % completed whn the search is in progress so i thought of dividing in to lines n searchng each line n caluclating the % so is there any way for tht.. hai

To get the percentage done, you first need to know how much there is to do. Are you planning on outputting the percentage only when matching the "word", or at set intervals? Outputting at set intervals would be more appropriate. What have you tried so far? Please post your code?

There are several methods to find out how many lines are in a file. The most common is to read-in the file into an array and assign a scalar the size (number of elements) of the array. Then you can use that scalar as the base to calculate the percentage done while looping through the array.

thanx for the reply Outputting at set intervals is better i think but if i use a array it may take lot of time and memory depending on the size of the file My aim is to display the % completed ramdomly while searching n display the results after search. here is the code tht am working with #!/usr/bin/perl print "Enter a File name :"; chomp ($file = <STDIN>); print "\n Searching file :"; if (system ("ls $file")==0) { print "File Found\n"; $lines = `wc -l $file`; @personal = split(/ /, $lines); $lines = @personal[0]; print "Total number of lines in the file = $lines \n"; print "Enter the pattern to search :"; chomp ($pattern = <STDIN>); print "\n"; # to search the no of words (pattern search) $abc=`grep $pattern $file | wc -l`; print "Total number of results found $abc \n"; print "here are the results ...\n"; system("grep $pattern $file"); } else{ print "File not Found\n"; } in place of system("grep $pattern $file"); i wann use a code tht can search by line so tht i can keep tht in a loop n calculcate the %. i you think this cant work can u gv me any idea or a sample code?? thanx agn ravi hai

Why are you writting a Perl script when instead of using Perl, you're shelling out every command? That makes no sense. You should either use Perl or a shell script, but please don't use Perl to simply execute shell commands and nothing else. Every Perl script you write should, without execption, start with loading the warnings and strict pragmas. http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/per... http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/per... If you're worried about the memory usage on LARGE files, you can use the Tie::File module. http://search.cpan.org/~mjd/Tie-Fil... =========================================== This doesn't meet all of your requirements, but it covers most of what you need. #!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; print 'Enter a File name: '; chomp (my $file = <STDIN>); die "$file can't be found\n" unless -e $file; print 'Enter a search pattern: '; chomp (my $pattern = <STDIN>); open (F, '<', $file) || die $!; my @lines = <F>; my $cnt = @lines; my $found = 0; foreach my $line (@lines) {      print $line and $found++ if $line =~ /\Q$pattern\E/; } print "\nTotal lines matched: $found\n";