Re: Access and modify specific element of tab delimited .txt file

[duelafn]

If you literally only need to create first entry, don't split?

perl -pe 'BEGIN { print "ID"; }' /tmp/test.dat

[mr_mischief]

This is an excellent example of finding the X in an X/Y problem. You've done a good job of separating the problem from the proposed solution on even a fairly simple example program. I'm going to bookmark this to reference for future discussions of this sort.