Well we could guess, or you could post code.

So are you in control of either the producer or consumer, source code wise?

Is the producer a perl script?

One while loop to input a guess, then 3 tests.

Is this you as well?
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread148485.html

I don't see why you need to read the whole file in, or store the whole file before writing it out.


while ( <FH> ) {
chomp;
my @f = split; # splits $_ at white-space
print DAT $f[0] ....

Replace
file.txt
with
*.txt

awk reads the file even more implictly than perl does. So implicitly in fact that you don't have to say anything at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awk

> how do i use it?
About the same as you would perl, except you type 'awk' instead of 'perl'

Along with 'sed' and 'grep', they form a family of text processing...

Dead easy in awk (Perl's baby sibling)
Assuming these are comma separated value files,
awk -F, '{ print $1 "," $6-$10 }' file.txt

The ! character is the default history modifier used by the bash shell (and nothing to do with perl). ! followed by all sorts of things, does all sorts of things.

Eg.
ls file.pl
cat !$
!$...

I'm not even going to pretend that you haven't read
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/announcement112-3.html
Edit your post so your code is readable, and not munged by smilies and zero indentation...

Ok, before everyone gets bored with yet another round of "20 questions", do you use some pre-defined API to get a file for you, even if you're not directly responsible for opening files?

Have you...

First random guess is you've reached the max number of open files you're allowed to have because you're not closing any of them.