Re: Reading through a file and checking for a specific string

[2teez]

Scanning through your codes, there are several stuff, that is wrong.
Please,

use warnings;
use strict;

to start with, then you will discovery that several of your codes didn't end with a ;.
You said you are using a glob function, but their is non in your code, so you only have the string "/export/home/date_file*.txt", in your array variable "@files".
Update:

I have array1 - @types that has these 2 letter strings(which I am supposed to check for in each file in each line, This variable is found in each line at 41st character.) and array2 - @counts where I am trying to store count if that match is found.

Instead of using two arrays, why don't you use a HASH, with the type of strings you would be looking for as the keys and initialized them to zero like so:

  my %type;
     @type{qw(AB AC AD AE FG)} = (0) x 5;

##then you have something like this:
$VAR1 = {
          'AC' => 0,
          'AE' => 0,
          'FG' => 0,
          'AB' => 0,
          'AD' => 0
        };

then later you can do... ^*

   while(...){
    ...
    $type{$_}++;  ## increasing the counting as you see needed string
    ...
  }

*NOTE:
I don't except the pseudo-code to work, since the OP didn't show any dataset.

[vihar]

Hi, I just updated it in my code. There were a few lines I added manually when I was writing this question. I forgot to put semi colons and glob function but I did that now. Thanks

[2teez]

Yes, you have, but there are still some there.
You still have a single quote without it's corresponding part here

@files = glob ('/export/home/date_file*);
               ^                       ^<-- not there

Then instead of these
 $counts[$i] ...
$files[$i]..
$counts[$i]++..
you are writing  @counts[$i] ...
@files[$i]..
@counts[$i]++.. Which in this case is not correct.

If I may give you a head up ( it might not be the best suited for you but it might point you in a right direction ).
I have a few text file in a directory, and am reading each file to see how many times some certain words were used like this:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %type;
@type{qw(is a an at)} = (0) x 4;

for my $file ( glob "*.txt" ) {
    open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!;
    while (<$fh>) {
        for (split) {
            $type{$_}++ if exists $type{$_};
        }
    }
}

print Dumper \%type;

my $total = 0;

$total += $type{$_} for keys %type;
print $total, $/;