Perl read line by line

Solution 1:

If you had use strict turned on, you would have found out that $++foo doesn't make any sense.

Here's how to do it:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $file = 'SnPmaster.txt';
open my $info, $file or die "Could not open $file: $!";

while( my $line = <$info>)  {   
    print $line;    
    last if $. == 2;
}

close $info;

This takes advantage of the special variable $. which keeps track of the line number in the current file. (See perlvar)

If you want to use a counter instead, use

my $count = 0;
while( my $line = <$info>)  {   
    print $line;    
    last if ++$count == 2;
}

Solution 2:

With these types of complex programs, it's better to let Perl generate the Perl code for you:

$ perl -MO=Deparse -pe'exit if $.>2'

Which will gladly tell you the answer,

LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {
    exit if $. > 2;
}
continue {
    die "-p destination: $!\n" unless print $_;
}

Alternatively, you can simply run it as such from the command line,

$ perl -pe'exit if$.>2' file.txt

Solution 3:

you need to use ++$counter, not $++counter, hence the reason it isn't working..