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I guess the right group for your question would be "Seekers for Perl Wisdom" and not "Discussion".

Concerning your problem:

use strict; # always do so (first thing I learned)
my $file = 'database';
my @result;
open(INF,$file) || die "Can't open $file: $!\n";
while (<INF>) { # while walking through file
  if(/???/) { # if you match your searchstring
              # you have to replace ??? by a regex 
    push @result,$_; # write current line to array
  }
}
[download]

HTH

weini