overwriting a file

[Anonymous Monk]

Hi Monks

I have a question that I believe must have an obvious answer, but I'm not perl-savvy enough to think of it. I'm lazy, impatient and full of hubris too. (But I have had a look through the tutorial and Q&A sections).

I have a text file that I want to automatically update at regular intervals. Sometimes the number of lines that need to be written to the file is smaller than the number of lines already existing in the file, with the result that some of the lines from the old version of the file are still present after I've over-written it. Is there any way of getting rid of these old,unwanted lines?

(At the moment, I'm just using a simple set of write instructions:

open OUTPUTFILE, ">$outputfile" or die "Couldn't open output file: $!"
+;
print OUTPUTFILE "blah blah blah";
close OUTPUTFILE;

)

TIA,

C J

[Sidhekin]

As long as you open the file with mode >, the old contents should be gone already.

Assuming you are opening with mode +>, +< or similar (for read/seek/write combos, particularly useful with file locking), this is a real problem, and the solution you are looking for is truncate, probably with tell:

truncate( OPENFILE, tell(OPENFILE) );

(Alternatively, if you can safely truncate to 0 before you even start writing, that might be clearer.)

[swampyankee]

As moritz and Sidhekin said, open HANDLE, "> $filename" should clear the file. Either there is something wrong with your version of Perl (very unlikely, as open is very heavily used) or there's something going on in the code which you're not telling us (much more likely). Try stripping down the code to the least amount that shows the odd behavior that you're reporting and posting it here or in your scratchpad.

[moritz]

I don't think that should happen... You could unlink the file first, just to be sure.

BTW more infos on the file opening modes can be found in perlopentut