3 weeks wasted? - will threads help?

[Limbic~Region]

All:
I have spent the last 3 weeks converting a suite of shells scripts to Perl. The purpose of this can be found here, although two of my initial requirements changed after a very long hard look at the transient files I was checking against.

Only the first 64K of the file needs to be read - if the string I am looking for is not there, it doesn't matter if it is elswhere in the file.

Removing imbedded newlines wasn't a real requirement since a match in the first 64K will never have the newline problem.

The following is the final code

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Time::Local;
chdir "/var/spool/wt400/gateways/" . $ARGV[0];
mkdir "capture", 0755 unless (-d "capture");
my $ListTime = 0;
my %Traps;
my @Files;
my $Counter = 1;
my $Size;
my $Now;
my $NF;
my $Matcher;
my $Match_code;

open (LOG, ">>/disk4/Logs/traps/" . $ARGV[0] . "_" . $ARGV[1] . ".log"
+);
flock(LOG,(2|4)) or exit;
select LOG;
while (1) {
  if ($Counter > 20 || ! %Traps) {
    if ( (stat("traplist." . $ARGV[1]))[9] gt $ListTime ) {
      $ListTime = (stat(_))[9];
      %Traps = ();
      open (LIST,"traplist." . $ARGV[1]);
      while (<LIST>) {
        next if (/^#/ || /^Created\t\tExpires/ || /^\s*$/);
        my @Fields = split "\t" , $_;
        next unless (@Fields == 8);
        chomp $Fields[7];
        my($mon, $day, $year, $hour, $min) = split ?[-/:]? , $Fields[1
+];
        my $Expiration =  timelocal(0, $min, $hour, $day, $mon - 1, $y
+ear + 100);
        $Traps{$Fields[7]} = [ $Expiration,@Fields[2,5,6] ];
      }
      close (LIST);
    }
    $Counter = 1;
  }

  $Now = time;
  $Match_code = "";
  $Size  = 0;

  foreach my $Trap (keys %Traps) {
    unless ($Traps{$Trap}[0] < $Now && $Traps{$Trap}[1]) {
      if ($Traps{$Trap}[3] eq "SIZE") {
        $Size = $Traps{$Trap}[2] if ($Traps{$Trap}[2] > 0);
      }
      else {
        $Trap =~ s/(\W)/\\$1/g;
        $Trap = "(?i-xsm)" . $Trap;
        $Match_code .= "return \"$Trap\" if \$_[0] =~ /$Trap/;";
      }
    }
  }

  exit unless ($Match_code || $Size);

  $Matcher = eval "sub {" . $Match_code . "}";

  if ($ARGV[1] eq "out") {
    @Files = <out/do*>;
  }
  elsif ($ARGV[1] eq "in") {
    @Files = <in/di*>;
  }
  else {
    @Files = <out/do* in/di*>
  }

  matchfile(\@Files);
  $Counter++;
  sleep 3;
}

sub matchfile {
  local($/) = \65536;
  FILE:
  while (my $File = shift @{$_[0]}) {
    if ($Size && -s $File >= $Size) {
      ($NF = $File) =~ s/^.*\///;
      rename $File , "capture/" . $NF . "-SIZE";
      print time . " " . $NF . " " . (stat(_))[7] . " SIZE\n";
      next FILE;
    }
    unless (open(FILE, $File)) {
      next FILE;
    }
    while (<FILE>) {
      my $Match = $Matcher->($_);
      if ($Match) {
        $Match =~ s/\(\?i-xsm\)//;
        ($NF = $File) =~ s/^.*\///;
        rename $File , "capture/" . $NF . "-" . $Traps{$Match}[3];
        print time . " " . $NF . " " . (stat(_))[7] . " " . $Traps{$Ma
+tch}[3] . "\n";
      }
      next FILE;
    }
  }
}

The traplist file that the data is read from looks like:

Created         Expires         Use     Type    Author  Size    Name    Trap
07:36:56-07:36  07:36:56-07:36  1       0       XYZ     98765   SIZE    N/A
07:36:56-07:36  07:36:56-07:36  1       0       XYZ     N/A     TRAP1   cool things to look for

The first arg is the name of the directory to look for the traplist file in as well as the base directory to work from based on arg 2.

The second arg gives the second piece of information to find the traplist file as well as the directory to work in

If arg1 = blah, you would look for the traplist file in /var/spool/wt400/gateways/blah
If arg2 = out, you would open /var/spool/wt400/gateways/blah/traplist.out and you would do your work in /var/spool/wt400/gateways/blah/out