So I have tried your suggestion and I am now getting this error

Here is my code as it stands can you see anything the pops out at you

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my $REG;
my @REGARRAY;
my $INI_DIR='/shares/MILKLINK/PPdir';

print "Enter Reg Number: ";
chomp ($REG = <>);

my $FILE = ('find %s *.dpt | xargs grep -l %s',$INI_DIR,$REG);

open $FILE, '<', my $DPT;

chomp(@REGARRAY, $FILE);
close $FILE;

foreach my $ITEM (@REGARRAY)
{
    system("/shares/optiload/prog/indref.sh $ITEM");    
}
[download]

PX12RUJ 
PX12RUR
PX12RUV
#PX12RUU
PX12WLJ
#PX12WLL
PX12WLK
PX12RUW
WN14YGV
WN14YGY
[download]

Hi Jim,

Try this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $INI_DIR='/shares/MILKLINK/PPdir';
my $REG;
print "Enter Reg Number: ";
chomp ($REG = <>);

my @FILE = `find $INI_DIR -name *.dpt | xargs grep -l $REG`;
print Dumper(\@FILE) . "\n";
[download]

Those quotes around 'find' are backquotes.

It is unclear to me what you want to do with the grepped lines.

Still didn't work same error...

simplest way of explaining it is the .dpt files contain a list of reference numbers which I want to read into an array and throw each individual ref number at the script ./indref.sh

But there are a few of these .dpt files, so I am trying to write a perl script that will look for a matching ref number out of all of the .dpt files which are all held in different directories.

Once the script has found a .dpt file with that ref number it reads the whole file into an array(as each line in the file only contacts the ref num) then passes each element (line) in the array(file) as command line arguements to the ./indref.sh script.

I hope this helps you get an idea of whats going on

thank you.