Reading a File Line by Line 

• An often used technique in CGI scripts for the manipulation of files is the reading of each line of a file. Perhaps we want to check each line for a keyword, or find every occurrence of some marker tag on a line and replace it with some other string. This process is done using a while loop as discussed previously. Consider this routine that will print out every line in a address file: 

open (ADDRESSES, "address.dat") || 
     &CgiDie ("Cannot open address.dat");
     while (<ADDRESSES>)
       {
       print "$_";
       }
     close (ADDRESSES);

• Thus, the script would print out every line in the file address.dat because "$_" is Perl's special name for "the current line" in this case. 

Additional Resources:

• Perl 
• Perl Resources 
• Instant Web Scripts With CGI 

Perl File Management
Table of Contents
Writing and Appending to Files