http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=619161

maurkb has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am attempting to search each line of each file in a directory for a specific string, and if found, grab a pertinent piece of data in the same line and then search for all the instances of that data and put them into another file. The files I'm searching are delimited by the pipe ("|") character. I am attempting to use split with the pipe as the delimiter but it seems to return each character into my array instead of each substring between pipes as if the delimiter is undefined. I am relatively new to PERL so I may be missing something quite obvious. My code is below...Any ideas?
#!/Usr/local/bin/perl; use Tie::File; use Getopt::Long; use warnings; #string to search for my($target1) = '6169600047'; #files and directories my($indir) = "c:/FAMD_EDI"; my($outdir) = "c:/FAMD_EDI"; my($outfile) = "FAMD_EDI_Master.txt"; open(OUTDIR, $outdir); open(OUTFILE,">$outdir/$outfile") or die "Cannot create output File"; opendir(MYDIR, $indir) or die "can't open dir $indir: $!"; while (defined($infile = readdir(MYDIR))) { next if $infile =~ /^\.\.?$/; open(FILEHNDL, "$indir/$infile") or die "Cannot open input file $!" +; while ($line = <FILEHNDL>) { chomp($line); #print "line= $line\n"; @cols = split(/|/, $line); if ($cols[11] = $target1) { #complete processing } } close(FILEHNDL); } close(OUTFILE); closedir(MYDIR);