Say if I have a list of names in a text file, like this (Bob, Bill, Steve, Sam, ) and I want to delete "Bill, ". How do I do that?

How big is your file (the size will depend on which code I show you :) )

Oh, I dunno. It's for a chatbot I'm making--a friendslist, to be precise. I want to add and delete names on the list with just a simple command. I have that part figured out, but all I need now is the code to find the username that I have specified, and if it's on the list, delete it. For example: '!defriend Joe456' --> Look for Joe456 on Friends.TXT --> If found, delete name. That's all I need, nothing fancy, just a simple thing to delete stuff out of text files without having to manually edit the textfiles because that's a pain in the butt.

grep..

open THISFILEHANDLEISSOLONG, "<friends.txt";
my @list = grep {/^$name$/}, <THISFILEHANDLEISSOLONG>;
close THISFILEHANDLEISSOLONG;

open THISFILEHANDLEISSOLONG, ">friends.txt";
print THISFILEHANDLEISSOLONG join ("\n", @list) . "\n";
close THISFILEHANDLEISSOLONG;

.. you can change the filehandle.

>>
my @list = grep {/^$name$/}, <THISFILEHANDLEISSOLONG>;
<<

That will never match, as each line will have a newline at the end and you are trying to match ^SomeName$, but you'd want something like this in any case:

my @list = grep { ! /^\Q$name\E\n$/ }, <THISFILEHANDLEISSOLONG>;

...to only match the ones you want, not the one's you don't want. From the first post it looks like the names are in a comma delimited list, not one per line anyway.

If your grep did match (which it won't), using join "\n", @array will then you leave you with blank lines all through your file.

Slurping into an array is also not a good idea if your file is faily lengthy.

Edit: You'll certainly want to use flocking too unless you like fixing corrupt databases.

It would probably be best to chomp the newlines instead of trying to match for them.

- wil

"best" in what way?....if you chomp them you are just going to have to put them back anyway. You may as well leave them in and do:

print FILEHANDLE @array;