G'day iThunder,

Welcome to the monastery.

"Any suggestions??"

Due to the unreadability of your post, I have only one suggestion at this point: please put your code in <code>...</code> tags and your text in <p>...</p> tags. Once you've done that, you'll probably find that useful comments are forthcoming on whatever your problem happens to be.

Here's some links that might help you with that:

• How do I change/delete my post?
• Writeup Formatting Tips
• How do I post a question effectively?

As others have asked, clean up the formatting of your post, with para and code tags. Then go back to your code and:

1. Format with consistent indentation
2. use strict; use warnings;
3. Fix the warning items
4. Fix the errors
5. Test your corrections with perl -c wordguess.pl (or whatever name you're using for the code)
6. Wash, rinse, repeat.
7. When no warnings or errors are issued at 6, try to execute the program.
8. (late addition: ) Now you're ready to insert debug statements to find your logical errors

If you get stuck, come back and show us (partially) corrected code and any msgs when you execute.

This is going to sound old-fashioned, but I'd recommend you spend some time in the Perl debugger. You can try out individual syntaxes, dump out variables, and get a feel for the language.

For example, you have syntax like @words1$a = $name;; it looks like you're trying to add $name to the words1 array at index $a. You haven't done this before, because that's the wrong syntax; and in any case, push is normally used to add elements to an array. Also, $a and $b are special variables used only in sort blocks -- it's not forbidden to use them, but it's considered bad style.

It's also handy to write yourself a comment or two so you have a good idea of what each piece of code is supposed to do. This will also help others understand what the code is meant to do.

O'Reilly's Learning Perl is a great starter book for this language.