You should have tried the solution ramlight gave you, it does look like what you were looking for. Maybe grep { $_ eq $input } @names instead of grep(/^$input$/, @names) would avoid some trouble with the metacharacters in $input though. And if you don't understang what it does, try and read grep's documentation :).

Another way to do it would be using a hash, because you have exists to check if a name exists (obviously) in it.

my @nameList = qw/Anna Beatrix Claude Damian/;
my %names = map { $_ => 1 }, @nameList; # associate the value 1 to eac
+h name in @namelist. Actually the value could be anything in this cas
+e
print "Anna exists" if exists $names{"Anna"};
print "Paul doesn't exist" unless exists $names{"Paul"};
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And as taint already stated, chomp your strings :)