first perl script...help anyone?

HI all,
I.m very new to Perl, but I've been told it's such a powerful language
for text processing I wanted to try it and learn. So, I'm writing my
first script which I need to process some text file.
Basically that's what I want to do: I have 3 files, I want to read
some informations from the first 2, and then write on the third. In
depth, I want to read every line from the first and retrieve that line
(or part of it) in a line of the second. Now, in the second file, I
want to read all the lines subsequent to the line retrieved untile a
termination charachter is found (in my case, when a line equal to the
dot (".") is met) and print some infos in third. I want to repeat the
operation until all the lines from the first line are ended.
That's what I wrote, but it doesn't work, in particular the variable
$count is always equal to 1. THat means it's not reading oll the lines
from the first file.

!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

open(FILEWRITE, ">write_seg06091999.txt")|| die "Could not open
$write_seg06091999.txt\n";
#open(FILESEG, "seg06091999.txt")|| die "Could not open
$seg06091999.txt\n";
#open(FILEALIGN, "walign06091999.txt")|| die "Could not open
$walign06091999.txt\n";
open(FILESEG, "seg_short.txt")|| die "Could not open seg_short.txt\n";
open(FILEALIGN, "align_short.txt")|| die "Could not open align-
short.txt\n";
$count = 1;
my $line_align = " ";

## read every line of a file
while ($line_seg = ) {

while($line_align = ){
if($line_align =~ /19990609_1900_1920_inter_fm_dga.$count/){
do{

if($line_align ne "."){
$line_align = ;
print FILEWRITE $line_align, "$count\n";
}
}until $line_align eq ".";
last;
}
}
$count = $count+1;

}

you have some ideas why it's not working?
probably ny programming style and my explantion sucks, so feel free to
ask for more clear explanations...


--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscribe@perl.org
For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-help@perl.org
http://learn.perl.org/