note zentara I don't know if anyone noticed, but in the sample file given, there was a space between the last word and the bracketed br in the first line, and no space in the second. I don't know if it was a typo, or if it was an intentional fine point. In any event, it screwed up the spilt on space to array, giving 1 extra element. <p>There may be a clever regex to do this, but here is a simple way a beginner can understand. <c> #!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; open (my $fh, "< test.txt") or die "$!\n"; #input file open (my $oh, "> $0-out.txt") or die "$!\n"; #output file my $script = '/home/whoever/bin/myscript.pl'; while (<$fh>){ my $string = $_; # strip off trailing <br> and anything after it $string =~ s/<br>.*$//; #strip whitespace at end in case space preceded the <br> $string =~ s/\s+$//; ## split on space my @words = split / /, $string; #print join "\n",@words,"\n"; my $lastword = $words[-1]; print $oh "$script $lastword\n"; } </c> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-131741"> <hr /> I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.<br> [id://630805] ................... <a href=http://zentara.net/japh.html> flash japh </a> </div></div> 981621 981621