yup....the code is a part of a tutorial and I am trying to built over it and of course this is my first attempt to fiddle with perl....Thanks for your help. The change that i had to make to get things work:

 
while (<>)
{
  if (my($ip,$date,$method,$url,$query,$protocol,$retcode,$byte)=($_=~
+ m/$LOG_PATTERN/))
       { print "IP :",$ip,"\n";}
}
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