seek

NAME

seek - reposition file pointer for random-access I/O

SYNOPSIS

seek FILEHANDLE,POSITION,WHENCE

DESCRIPTION

Randomly positions the file pointer for FILEHANDLE, just like the fseek() call of stdio. FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the name of the filehandle. The values for WHENCE are 0 to set the file pointer to POSITION, 1 to set the it to current plus POSITION, and 2 to set it to EOF plus offset. You may use the values SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, and SEEK_END for this from POSIX module. Returns 1 upon success, 0 otherwise.

On some systems you have to do a seek whenever you switch between reading and writing. Amongst other things, this may have the effect of calling stdio's clearerr(3). A ``whence'' of 1 (SEEK_CUR) is useful for not moving the file pointer:

seek(TEST,0,1);

This is also useful for applications emulating tail -f. Once you hit EOF on your read, and then sleep for a while, you might have to stick in a seek() to reset things. First the simple trick listed above to clear the filepointer. The seek() doesn't change the current position, but it does clear the end-of-file condition on the handle, so that the next <FILE<> makes Perl try again to read something. Hopefully.

If that doesn't work (some stdios are particularly cantankerous), then you may need something more like this:

for (;;) { for ($curpos = tell(FILE); $_ = <FILE>; $curpos = tell(FILE)) { # search for some stuff and put it into files } sleep($for_a_while); seek(FILE, $curpos, 0); }