It worked! I'll have to digest what you did, this evening. It's been raining for over a week and the sun is finally out so, I have to take care of some yard work. Thanks again, Chas! T
"Chas. Owens" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On Jan 26, 2008 1:13 PM, John Kufrovich wrote: > Chas, > Thanks for the help. I'm not expert but I think your code will output each > line. snip You don't have to be an expert to run the code and see what it does (it only prints out the hour and temp for the first instance of each hour). If you want to print out the whole line for the first instance of each hour you can simplify the regex and the print: #! /usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my %seen; while () { my ($hour) = / (..)/; print unless $seen{$hour}++; } __DATA__ 2007-01-23 00:01:00,43.3,34.9,30.14,North,359,7,8,72,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 00:06:00,43.2,34.8,30.14,North,354,11,11,72,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 00:12:00,43.2,34.8,30.14,North,1,6,9,72,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 01:11:00,42.9,34.8,30.13,North,1,5,6,73,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 01:17:00,42.9,34.8,30.12,NNW,346,3,7,73,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 01:23:00,43.1,35.0,30.12,North,359,5,11,73,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 02:14:00,43.2,34.1,30.10,North,0,16,16,70,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 02:19:00,43.2,34.1,30.09,North,0,6,13,70,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 02:24:00,43.2,33.7,30.09,North,349,8,14,69,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 03:04:00,43.2,34.1,30.11,North,0,7,12,70,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, 2007-01-23 03:09:00,43.2,34.1,30.11,North,0,10,17,70,0.00,,,0.00,Wunderground v.1.13, This can be further refined into a single command: perl -ne '($h)=/ (..)/;print unless $s{$h}++' file_to_filter