note 2teez Hi,<p> <i>Please help me out to find my flaws</i><br><br> Please consider the following:<br> <ul> <li> It's a lot better, to use [doc://warnings]; and [doc://strict]; at the top of ones script</li> <li> It's modern ( ha ha... ) and a lot safer to use [doc://open] 3 arugments</li> <li>Barewords as filehandles might not be too good, you can use lexical variable of your choice.</li> <li>Lastly, you will want to close, your filehandles, as soon as they are [doc://open]ed</li> </ul> <br> Below is the reconstruct of your script.<br>Please, note I used regex to get what I <i>assumed</i> to be first column of your data used.<br> Using [doc://split] or even [doc://substr] might probabily be better, if OPs data is known. I can only assume data here.<br> <code> use warnings; use strict; open my $fh, '>', 'outfile3.txt' or die "can't open file: $!"; open my $fh2, '<', 'file1.txt' or die "can't open file: $!"; while ( defined( my $line = <$fh2> ) ) { if ( $line =~ m{^(?<matched>.+?)\s+?.*?$}){ print {$fh} $+{matched}, $/; } } close $fh2 or die "can't close file: $!"; close $fh or die "can't close file: $!"; </code> Hope this helps. </p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-918402"> If you tell me, I'll forget.<br> If you show me, I'll remember.<br> if you involve me, I'll understand.<br> --- Author [unknown to me] </div></div> 995703 995703