Re: perl head and tail command ?

Richard Lee wrote:
>
> I would imagine linux's head command can be replaced w/ chop
> I asked this because I have a filehandle which was,
> 
> open $source, '/tmp/server.txt'   ( and no doing head -1 /tmp/server.txt

> is not an option since I need to go through some other stuff
> before i need to issue below command )
> 
> and I wanted to do
> 
> my $top = `head -1 $source`
> my $bottom = `tail -1 $source`
> 
> but I realized I cannot do $source in back tick.
> 
> so I imagine i can do
> 
> my $top = chop $source;
> 
> But what about the $bottom one?

The chop() function simply removes the last character from a string and
returns it. Since $source isn't a string you would get an error. Your best
bet is likely to be the Tie::File module. For instance

  use strict;
  use warnings;

  use Tie::File;

  tie my @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 'Tie::File', '/tmp/server.txt' or die $!;

  my ($top, $bottom) = @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 -1];

HTH,

Rob