Here's another take. It looks like you want to read an argument list
for a program. It also looks like you are just using the file as a temporary
test method to develop the prog, as I have followed in the example below.
But you are possibly making life too complicated for yourself using a list
to store what will in reality be a string of values or flags.
When you come to use this code for real, to get arguments replace <FILE> with @ARGV at line 7.
Alternatively, try using getopt::Std.
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $list = './argslist'; # test file of args
my @argstomatch = ('--hack','--and','--pray','--elephants');
my $srvr;
open (FILE, "<$list") or die "open $list failed: $!\n";
for(<FILE>){$srvr .= $_}; # append all lines together
close (FILE);
# at this point we are done collecting - everything is
+ in one $srvr string
# the rest demonstrates index
for $argfindme(@argstomatch)
{
printf ("%s\t%s\n", $argfindme, index($srvr,$argfindme));
}
You will see a number next to each argument in the @argstomatch list.
This is -1 if the argument doesn't exist, otherwise it's the position of the first character of the match in $srvr.