Re^3: "Global Symbol Requires Explicit Package Name" error

[kutsu]

I'd recommend you check out woolfy's Where and how to start learning Perl as there are some strange assumptions here, but a possible rewrite:

use strict;
use warnings; #good!
use Win32::OLE;
use Date::Calc; why load when you don't use it, or Win32::OLE?

#having a few variable with a large lexical scope isn't  
#nessarily bad but in general use the smallest scope

# This acutally assigns the file location to a scalar
# doesn't get anything (as [holli] stated)
my %header_data;
my $f_mfg_desk = '//163.../chicago_wip_query.txt';

# Since you don't actually use @headers: I dropped it
# If you needed it just say why and I'll go from there

# "time" gives seconds after epoch which is proably not what you want,
+ see localtime*
my ($sec, $min, $hour, $dayofmonth, $month, $year, $weekday, $day) = l
+ocaltime(time);
$month++;
$year += 1900;

open (INFILE, $f_mfg_desk);
#if you do my $record = <INFILE> you'd need chomp($record);... or
while (<INFILE>)
{
  chomp;
  my @newrow = split /\t/;
  #missing the ]; here
  $header_data{$newrow[2]} = [ $newrow[3..18] ];
}
close(INFILE);

#to sort and reprint (proably want to copy a backup too)
open (OUTFILE, ">$f_mfg_desk");

# see perldsc* and sort*
for my $key (sort keys %header_data)
{
  #see perlref* for @{}
  for my $a (@{$header_data{$key}})
  {
    print OUTFILE "$a\t";
  }
  print OUTFILE "\n";
}

*:localtime, perldsc, sort, perlref

[Portree]

Hi Kutsu
Thank you for the response, I really appreciate the time that you took to respond back. Some answers to your questions:

I was using Date::Calc to get the current date and compare it to the date that I need to use as a cutoff for rows that I want to delete. If that is in error and I don't need it to do that, then I am fine to drop it.

The next question, Win32::OLE, I have put that on as a standard to most of my programs, so I have to admit that was out of habit.

Finally, even with your code, I still get an error uninitialized value in hash element..., and it points me to this section of code in line 29  $header_data{$newrow[2]} = [ $newrow[3..18] ];

I appreciate the links to the documents, I will print those out and read them. Thank you very much again.
Portree

[kutsu]

I'd bet you can't open the '//163.../query.txt' file (I don't work with windows much but shouldn't / be \ instead), as that uninitialized value means $newrow[2] has nothing in it (might try a print "@newrow", "\n"; or use Data::Dumper; print Dumper @newrow; to check).

[benizi]

The '//ip-address/folder/file' format works fine for me, here. Just as with all backslashes in Windows filenames, Perl does the right thing. (Thank goodness FAT*/NTFS/etc. disallow '/'s in filenames.) I did get an error, however, if I didn't log in to the SAMBA server at my test IP address before running the script. So, that might be something to consider.