G'day ostra,

You've provided no example data. Here's my guess at what it might look like (based on your code):

$ cat qqq.txt
a
c

$ cat exp.txt
1       a
11      a
2       b
333     c
[download]

Here's a solution using Tie::File:

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -Mautodie=:all -E '
    use Tie::File;
    tie my @exp, q{Tie::File}, q{exp.txt};
    tie my @qqq, q{Tie::File}, q{qqq.txt};
    for my $search (@qqq) {
        my @results = map { $search eq $_->[1] ? $_->[0] : () }
                      map { [ split /\t/ ] } @exp;
        say "$search: @results";
    }
'
a: 1 11
c: 333
[download]

Some additional notes:

• 'And I do realize I did not have "or die" text ...' — consider using autodie.
• If you're likely to have duplicate search strings (e.g. from a UI Search function rather than a file), Memoize might be useful to avoid duplicate searches.
• Think about the volume of data you're dealing with and Benchmark to identify potentially good or bad solution options.