How to write a perl script to search text files for a specific string and copy the whole line to a new file?

Comments

1. Michael JB says:
   April 2, 2010 at 7:08 pm

   a quicker way than using Perl would be to use grep…if you have access to it. It will be on your system if you are using Linux or Unix and is available in Cygwin if you are using windows. Try this:

   grep -h YOUR_KEYWORD_HERE *.txt > results.txt

   if you MUST use Perl, the absolute best programming language in the world IMHO, try this:

   ——–cut——–
   # this is so we can use English shortcuts like $ARG and such
   use English;

   # open a file to store the results
   open (OUTPUT, ">results.txt") || die ("Could not open file results.txt; $OS_ERROR");

   # read each input file from the command line
   # i.e. perl keyword.pl file1.txt file2.txt …
   while (<>) {

   # if the line has the keyword, print it to the output file
   if ($ARG =~ /YOUR_KEYWORD_HERE/) {
   print OUTPUT $ARG;
   warn "Found YOUR_KEYWORD_HERE in $ARGV\n";
   }
   }

   # close the output file
   close (OUTPUT);
   ——–cut——–

   I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out which one is faster when dealing with files larger than 1 MB or so. Also, you might want to do both and then diff the results to see any differences between the two.