Hi everyone, I am fairly new to perl and having problems with pulling in multiple lines from a file so I can search those lines and if it has the expression I am looking for then I want to return to that file and search again for the same pattern of lines again and then search again for the pattern in those line and save it to a file. Between each group of text is a "!" exclamation point. ! line of text 1 line of text 2 line of text 3 ! line of text 4 line of text 5 ! and so on. Thanks in advance everyone. Gary Butler __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/