Re: Re: Blank data file

[Anonymous Monk]

First off, thanks all.

Aristotle... I appreciate your comments but I'm not really a perl programmer and I don't particularly want to be. ;-) When I write server side scripts from scratch I use PHP and I tend to enjoy it. :-)

The code I gave is modified from the file access routines that an existing set of scripts was already using. I'm aware it's redundant, server intensive, and generally low end. What you saw was only the beginning. The entire member database is flat file.

The client, however, didn't ask for a rewrite (just a new script to do X, X and X) and they definitely didn't pay for one.

[Necos]

<rant mode>
While it's a shame that you don't want to learn Perl, that's no excuse to write crappy code.
</rant mode>

On the other hand, it would be best (in future projects) to:

use strict;
use warnings;

--------------------------------------------------------

<rant mode again>
Bad programming practices are bad programming practices no matter what language you're coding in. To quote one of the other monks: "Only Bad Coders Code Bad Perl." There is a nice tutorial on file locking here that would be of some great use to you in future projects. Please! Please! Please! Read up on files and file locking before writing code for "clients." I've already been bitten by not handling file locking properly, so I suggest doing some more in-depth reading, even if you're not going to become an uber Perl coder.
</rant mode>

Theodore Charles III
Network Administrator
Los Angeles Senior High
4650 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90019
323-937-3210 ext. 224
email->[e-mail]
perl -e "map{print++$_}split//,Mdbnr;"