copy line with character

[jalopez453]

Hello everyone, I am looking for a little help on my code here. I want to copy the lines that have the letter M in the first column but not sure what I am doing wrong or what is missing. I am very new to perl, so I apologize for this very basic request. Thank you in advance for the help

use strict;

my $find = 'M';

    open (NEW, ">", "output.txt" ) or die "could not open:$!";

    open (FILE, "<", "Report.txt") or die "could not open:$!";

        while (<FILE>) {
        print NEW if (/$find/);
    }
close (FILE);
close (NEW);

[stevieb]

Hi jalopez453, welcome to the Monastery!

When asking a question of PerlMonks, please provide us some of your sample input data, and what your expected output would look like (both in <code></code> tags as you've done with your actual code).

I suspect what you're getting as output are all lines that contain M, but anywhere in the string, not just at the beginning. What you need to do is specify in your regex that you ONLY want to match if an M is at the start of your string. You do this by using the caret, aka ^ at the beginning of your regex:

my $find = '^M';

After that change is made, using this data:

no M at start
M at start
M at start again
another line, no M at start

I get this output:

M at start
M at start again

[jalopez453]

Sorry about that. For the next questions I have I will remember to include a sample of my input file. Thank you so much for the quick response this is exactly what I was wanting to accomplish!

[jalopez453]

If you are still available, I do have another question? :) If I want to include the second line after the line containing M and wrap it all into one line on the output file what would I have to include?

sample of input file:
M12345678 John Doe 11/20/15 M987654
              REJECTED      FAILED
---------------------------------------------
sample of output file:
M12345678 John Doe 11/20/15 M987654 REJECTED FAILED

use strict;

my $find = '^M';

    open (NEW, ">", "output.txt" ) or die "could not open:$!";

    open (FILE, "<", "Report.txt") or die "could not open:$!";

        while (<FILE>) {
        print NEW if (/$find/);
    }
close (FILE);
close (NEW);