Re: how to update a field of a record in a large text file

[mickeyn]

assuming you are familiar with the use of regular expressions (see 'perldoc perlre' if not), what you want is to perform a substitution using regular expression on this record.

to do it on a text file - I recommend tie'ing the file to an array and perform the substitution on the array. take a look at Tie::File.

example:

use Tie::File;

tie @array, 'Tie::File', 'test';

foreach (@array){
        s/RECORD/NEW RECORD/g;
}

untie @array;

Enjoy,
Mickey

[CountZero]

That supposes of course that you know beforehand the content of the record to be searched (perhaps you only know its ID) and enough info on its fields to construct the regex to immediately replace the data of the field to be changed.