Auto incrementing a variable

[jsprgrmr]

I have a flat file that I am using as a database currently it contains 7 records with 9 fields per record. the first field is refNum. the records are stored as standard input. What I want to do is to increment refNum by 1 automaticly when a new record is added. Logically I know that I have to find the last occurance of refNum, increase it by 1 refNum++ and write that new record with the new refNum. How do I code this?

 

[Haunter]

Use this to increase the variable by 1.

$num++;

HTH

 

[jsprgrmr]

Haunter,

Thanks for your input, actually incrementing the variable is not the problem.

The problem is assigning that value to a new record when it is written. I need to get the value of the refNum in the last record of the file, increment it, assign the new refNum value to an new record, and append the new record to the file.

tia

 

[goBoating]

smells like hw, but, I can't resist.

Given a flat-file db like

1|||||||||
2|||||||||
3|||||||||
4|||||||||
5|||||||||
6|||||||||
7|||||||||
8|||||||||

The following will read the last line, bump the first value up one, and add a new line.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# use strict;
open(I,&quot;<flat_file.db&quot;) or die(&quot;Failed to open db.&quot;);
my @recs = <I>;
close I;
my @rn = split /\|/, pop @recs;
my $rn = shift @rn;
$rn++;

open(O,&quot;>>flat_file.db&quot;) or die(&quot;Failed to open db.&quot;);
print O &quot;$rn|||||||||\n&quot;;
close O;

print &quot;$rn\n&quot;;

'hope this helps

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