use Perl

Every once in a while I come across something that reminds me why I love Perl so much. This happened to me again this morning.

I had a file that needed to be split into a number of files. The start of each new file was indicated with a line that looked like:

==== file.ext ====

where "file.ext" is the name of the new file.

The Perl code to split the file looks like this:

while (<>) {
  if (/==== (.*) ====/) {
    close STDOUT;
    open STDOUT, ">$1" or die "Can't open $1: $!\n";
  } else {
    print;
  }
}

Which is a lot simpler than I was expecting when I started to write it.