G'day moviesigh,

Welcome to the monastery.

You have a problem with:

my ($filename, @mainword, $distance, @search) = @ARGV;
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That code will assign values as follows:

• $filename will be $ARGV[0]
• @mainword will be @ARGV[1 .. $#ARGV] [Note: all of @ARGV has now been used!]
• $distance will be undefined
• @search will be an empty array

For reading complex arguments from the command line, I'd suggest Getopt::Long.

Update: Oops! Typo in my array slice: s/$ARGV[1 .. $#ARGV]/@ARGV[1 .. $#ARGV]/