Script to remove first line from all the text files in a directory - perl

Question

I'm trying to write a Perl script which reads all the text files in a directory and writes all the lines except first to a separate file. If there are 3 files, I want the script to read all those 3 files and write 3 new files with same lines except the first. This is what I wrote.. but when I try to run the script, it executes fine with no errors but doesn't do the work it is supposed to. Can someone please look into it?
opendir (DIR, "dir\\") or die "$!";
my #files = grep {/*?\.txt/} readdir DIR;
close DIR;
my $count=0;
my $lc;
foreach my $file (#files) {
$count++;
open(FH,"dir\\$file") or die "$!";
$str="dir\\example_".$count.".txt";
open(FH2,">$str");
$lc=0;
while($line = <FH>){
if($lc!=0){
print FH2 $line;
}
$lc++;
}
close(FH);
close(FH2);
}
And the second file doesn't exists, it is supposed to be created by script.

Answer 1

Try changing these lines
opendir (DIR, "dir\\") or die "$!";
...
close DIR;
to
opendir (DIR, "dir") or die "$!";
...
closedir DIR;
I tried running your code locally and the only two issues I had were with the directory name containing the trailing slash and trying to use the filehandle close() function on a dirhandle.

Answer 2

If you have the list of files ...
foreach my $file ( #files ) {
open my $infile , '<' , "dir/$file" or die "$!" ;
open my $outfile , '>' , "dir/example_" . ++${counter} . '.txt' or die "$!" ;
<$infile>; # Skip first line.
while( <$infile> ) {
print $outfile $_ ;
}
}
The lexical filehandles will be closed automatically when going out of scope.

Answer 3

Not sure why you're using $count here, as that's going to just turn a list of files like:
01.txt
bob.txt
alice.txt
02.txt
into:
01_1.txt
bob_2.txt
alice_3.txt
02_4.txt
Keep in mind, #files isn't being sorted, so it will return in the order the files exist in the directory table. If you were to delete and re-create the file 01.txt, it would be moved to the end of the list, re-ordering the whole set:
bob_1.txt
alice_2.txt
02_3.txt
01_4.txt
Since that wasn't really part of your original question, this does exactly what you asked to do:
#!/usr/bin/perl
while(<*.txt>) { # for every file in the *.txt glob from the current directory
open(IN, $_) or die ("Cannot open $_: $!"); # open file for reading
my #in = <IN>; # read the contents into an array
close(IN); # close the file handle
shift #in; # remove the first element from the array
open(OUT, ">$_.new") or die ("Cannot open $_.new: $!"); # open file for writing
print OUT #in; # write the contents of the array to the file
close(OUT); # close the file handle
}