Perl Cookbook

Removing the Last Line of a File

Problem

You’d like to remove the last line from a file.

Solution

Read the file a line at a time and keep track of the byte address of the last line you’ve seen. When you’ve exhausted the file, truncate to the last address you saved:

open (FH, "+< $file")               or die "can't update $file: $!";
while ( <FH> ) {
    $addr = tell(FH) unless eof(FH);
}
truncate(FH, $addr)                 or die "can't truncate $file: $!";

Discussion

This is much more efficient than reading the file into memory all at once, since it only holds one line at a time. Although you still have to grope your way through the whole file, you can use this program on files larger than available memory.

See Also

The open and binmode functions in perlfunc(1) and in Chapter 3 of Programming Perl; your system’s open (2) and fopen (3) manpages