[Classiccity-pm] basic idiot question

[Jeff Scarbrough]

Hello all stations,

I have been using Perl for simple file processing for about a year, mostly 
to reorganize lines of data and do simple averaging.

Today's project is a little more complicated:  I have two or three similar 
data files from different instruments, and I need to read them all in and 
output a file where the times recorded in each line match.  It's 
complicated because each instrument will not necessarily put out data each 
minute - sometimes it will skip a minute, sometimes it will skip twenty 
minutes.

I have some ideas about how I might make this happen, but before I use 
brute force, I wondered if Perl might have some special functions I'm not 
aware of that would make the job a lot easier...seems like this is a 
perfect job for Perl, and I'm sure it's been done before.

TIA,

Jeff