I've read your questions, and I think your problem is you thought you could just jump right into Perl, and use your previous knowledge to figure it out as you go. You would have been far happier, if you read a couple of the free books and/or tutorials first. Perl is closer to c, than any other language I've seen, it's not like batch files at all. You are thinking like a bash shell ( linux equivalent of dos shell) programmer. Perl goes a level deeper than that.

P.S. Perl is very sensitive to spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. From your posts, you seem to be having trouble with those things. When doing your Perl programs, always put "use warnings"; at the beginning of your script, to help you catch all the typos, before you start blaming Perl.