[SLUG] Perl question

[Michael Lake]

Hi All,

OK this is a perl Q not Linux but it's Sunday night. :-)
Am having probs opening several files in a perl script using indirect
filehandles.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

################################################################
# This script reads the ASF's Apache log files and extracts accesses by
specific users. These accesses are regularly emailed to the users by a
cron
script.
################################################################

use strict;
use FileHandle;

my $fileUsers="users";  # I use IN for the file handle for this.
my $fh; 
my $fhUser; # File handle for files. 

# Here is where I open a user list and read it in. Im used to this way. 
# I am used to using direct filehandles like this ie IN.

open (IN, "$fileUsers") || die "Cannot open file $fileUsers for
reading\!";
while(<IN>) {
        ($users_login, $users_name, $users_email) = split(/:/, $_); 
        push(@users, $users_login);
}
close (IN) || die "Cannot close file $fileUsers\!";

All the above is OK.
Now here I have probs. For each user I want to open a file with the 
filename being the same as the name of the user.
I want to have this file open for the duratiion of parsing an Apache
log file and write to each one so I need a filehandle for each user
file.

If I try this below:

foreach $user (@users) 
{
        $fhUser = "handle".$user;
        open ($shUser, ">> $user") || die "Cannot open file $user for
reading\!";
        print $fhUser "Hi $user\n";
}

I get the error upon running of:
 "Can't use string ("handlemike") as a symbol ref while "strict refs" in
use at ./process line 90."

So I tried this from the Programming Perl book, chap 7 using the
FileHandle method:

foreach $user (@users) 
{
        $fh = new FileHandle ">> $user";
        $fhUser = $fh.$user;
        if (defined $fhUser) {
                print $fhUser "Hi $user\n";
                print $fhUser $subject;
                print $fhUser "Date File from IP Address\n";
        }
        else {
                print "Cannot open file $user for writing\!";
        }       
}

and I get 
"Can't use string ("FileHandle=GLOB(0x1202e1600)mike") as a symbol ref
while "strict refs" in use at ./process line 82."

Then all I want to do is the processing....

while (<>)
{
  Here is where I do processing and writing stuff to those open
files.... 
  print $fhUser "$words[3] $words[4] $words[6] from $words[0]\n";
  etc......
}

and then close all those open files...
foreach $user (@users) 
{
        print "Total logins: $users{$user}\n";
        $fhUser->close;
}

It's just that I have not used indirect filehandles before and the
Learning Perl book only has examples of direct filehandles.

Mike
-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Lake
Active caver, Linux enthusiast and interested in anything technical.
Safety Convenor, Australian Speleological Federation
Owner, Speleonics (Australia)
--------------------------------------------------------------------

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