1st file: pizza pickle omellete coke blackforest croissant 2nd file: salt pizza 1 salt pickle 1 pepper omelette 1 pepper pickle 1 I want is: (If ingredient in file 2 is not found in food from file 1, annotate it as "0" instead of "1"). salt pizza 1 salt pickle 1 salt omellette 1 salt coke 0 salt blackforest 0 salt croissant 0 sugar pizza 0 sugar pickle 0 sugar omellette 0 sugar coke 1 sugar blackforest 1 sugar croissant 0 I wrote this which is obviously wrong: open(INPUTR,"<$1file") || die "Can't open \$1file for reading.\n"; while($line=){     chomp $line;     $food = $line;         open(INPUTR1,"<$2file") || die "Can't open \$2file for reading.\n";         while($line1=){             chomp $line1;             @toks = split(/\t/, $line1);             $ingredient = uc$toks[0];             $food1 = uc$toks[1];             $linemod = $line1;             if ($food1 !~ $food){                 $linemod = $ingredient."\t".$food."\t"."0";             }         }         close(INPUTR1);         print OUTD $linemod."\n"; }