In terms of a code review, I can give you the following suggestions and comments.

• You're reading in the entire log file into an array with the line my @input = <LOG>; I don't know about you, but the log files I come across vary between large and immense. There's no reason to suck the entire file into memory. Better just to read a line at a time.
• You are apprently interested in logging where in the file a particular date starts. If you'd used while(<LOG>) you could have just used the builtin variable $.. In anycase, why not use something meaningful like $LineNumber rather than the anonymous $counter.
• Your declaration of $_ is redundant. Perl assumes $_ if you don't declare a loop variables. But that line disappears if you use the while loop mentioned above.
• At the end you test if the log file is 'blank'; wouldn't it be better to explain that you're testing to see if the date you were looking for was found? In any case, you've used eq which is a string compare. To see if a value is the same as zero, use ==

So if I were rewriting the code, I'd say

while ( <LOG> )
{
  if ( /$date/ ) { print LOG_FILE <LOG>; }  # UPDATED
}
[download]

What does this code do? If the target date is found while looking through the log file, print the remainder of the log file. The print will continue until the file runs out. At that point the loop will continue, but the log file has run out, and the loop will exit. (This assumes that the data is sorted!)

Study hard. :)

--t. alex

"Of course, you realize that this means war." -- Bugs Bunny.

Update: Added LOG_FILE file handle that was missing from the original post, as indicated by replies after this note.

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