Greetings Monks.

I want to write a program I can call while editing a file with VI and have it perform some actions on the lines of text I have selected, something like

:1,17! perlprogram

Where would I go to find some good examples of how to think about this? I can write something that would look though a whole file, but I want to be more selective about what gets changed. I want it to look at each line within those 17 and do things if it matches certain Regular Expressions.

This may seem hopelessly archaic (it is), but I work for a company where we are making tons of these changes by hand, and a utility that would do this for us Might make people more willing to looks at more interesting uses for Perl. I've got a couple of seds that do it now, but a one shot program would be Much better.

Thanks in advance.

(update #1)

Ha! I figured it out. Some of it anyway. This works:

 
#!/usr/bin/perl
 while (<>) {                         
         if (/'5'/) {                 
                 s/[Nn]01/N01(+5) /g; 
                 s/'5'/'5';fac=5/g;   
                 }                    
         if (/'4'/) {                 
                 s/[Nn]01/N01(+4) /g; 
                 s/'4'/'4';fac=4/g;   
                 }                    
         print "$_";                  
         }
[download]

Thanks Paladin-- your example with the <> got me on the right track of profitable trial and error. And I will look more closely at the command line switches, too, sleepingsquirrel. I'd still appreciate more comments and ideas. Thanks again.

(Update #2)

Does anyone have any idea why the file so edited has a blank space at the beginning of each line? Here's a simpler (and cooler) program for reference:

 #!/usr/bin/perl -w                         
                                            
 while (<>) {                               
         s/[Nn]01\(\+.\) /n01/g;            
         s/;fac=.//g;                       
         unless (/^net/i) {print "$_";}     
         }
[download]

I am kind of proud of figuring out a way to get it to delete lines containing "net" when

s/^net/d

didn't work (Sorry, I learned sed first.) Thanks again, everyone.

Update 3:

Blank space was in the test file I was using. Nevermind. Thanks.