Hello moviesigh, and welcome to the Monastery!

In addition to the problem identified by kcott, there are some problems with your matching logic. Here are two:

First, note that \Q disables pattern metacharacters until the next occurence of \E (see “Escape Sequences” in Regular Expressions). But the regex in your first while loop uses the variable $mainword which has been initialised to (Steve\ Jobs|Executive), and the pipe symbol | needs to be a metacharacter for the regex logic to work.

Second, I have my doubts about the for loop — which, by the way, would be better written:

for my $dist (0 .. $distance) {
[download]

Quantifying a regex match using {0} (which is what you get on the first iteration) serves no purpose. But I don’t think you want a loop here at all? Something like {1,$dist} might better capture the intention?

Hope that helps,