use Modern::Perl; my @array = ( [ qw/ 1 1 1 1 1 / ], [ qw/ 0 1 1 0 0 / ], [ qw/ 0 0 0 0 1 / ], [ qw/ 0 0 0 0 0 / ], [ qw/ 0 1 0 1 0 / ], ); my $rownumber = 0; for my $row (@array) { do {say "row $rownumber has all zeroes"; last} unless (join '', @$row)+0; $rownumber++ }