RE: Writing to files

[Anonymous Monk]

I've got a program online that does insertion into a file (http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/tmp/perl/add_lines). But the bigger question is, WHY DO YOU NEED TO DO THIS? Observe:

open FILE, ">>data" or die "can't append to data: $!";
print FILE "NEW RECORD\n";
close FILE;

# now, to store the file's contents in an array, MOST
# RECENT DATA FIRST, use unshift instead of push!

open FILE, "data" or die "you know the drill... $!";
unshift @contents, $_ while <FILE>;
close FILE;

[turnstep]

Why do you need to do what? Your question is not clear. Yes, you can unshift into an array, but that has nothing to do with writing the file...

[btrott]

Not to put words in his mouth, but the point I think japhy (right?) was trying to make was that, if the reason you're writing to the beginning of the file is that you think that there's where you should store the most "recent" information, then there's really no point.

Just keep your file in chronological order (oldest at beginning, newest at end) and, when you're reading the file into memory, use unshift rather than push so that the newest data ends up at the beginning of the array.

Which definitely makes sense, and makes the problem quite a lot less complicated, if that's the reason the op wanted to write to the beginning of the file.

[japhy]

Yeah, that was me. And you're correct -- there's no need to write to the TOP of a file, just so that it is in newest-to-oldest order. Use the append + unshift method. It's smarter.