Re: Perl beginner here, needs a shove in the right direction.

[aaron_baugher]

I wouldn't recommend slurping the files, since you want to look at individual lines. Just go through the files one by one, checking each file line-by-line. Since you're looking for design guidance rather than code, the logic would go something like this:

create a hash which has the keywords to watch for as its keys
foreach file (probably using File::Find) do
    open file (error check)
    foreach line in file
        split the line into fields
        is the first field from this line in my hash of important keyw
+ords?
            if yes, are there empty or dash fields in this line?
                if yes, report this file
                           (and keyword and/or line number, optionally
+)
                    and move on to next file
    end of lines
    close file
end of files

Take a look at File::Find; all the indented code above would be part of the callback you'd pass to File::Find's find() method.

[rfromp]

Thank you Aaron B, design is one of my weaknesses. You specifically say to "split the line into fields", however the lines are already delimited into fields by a forward slash, so is there something extra needed there?

The line of the file I'm interested in looks something like this:

DATA/-/data123/data456//data789/-/AZ

[aaron_baugher]

I'm talking about using the split function to split the line into an array of fields, like this:

my $line = 'DATA/-/data123/data456//data789/-/AZ';
my @fields = split '/', $line;

that will put the fields in that array. Then you can check the first element of the array, $fields[0] , to see if it's in your hash of important keywords. If it is, you can grep the rest of the fields to see if any are the empty string or a dash. Here's an example with the sample line you gave:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.010; use strict; use warnings;

my %keys = ('DATA' => 1);        # setup a hash of keywords

my $line = 'DATA/-/data123/data456//data789/-/AZ';
my @fields = split '/', $line;   # split line into fields on a slash
if( $keys{$fields[0]} ){         # is the first element in my hash of 
+keywords
    my $keyword = shift @fields; # remove the keyword from the fields 
+array
    if( grep { $_ eq '' or $_ eq '-' } @fields ){   # are any elements
+ empty or a dash?
        say "Line has problems, keyword $keyword";
    }
}