I don't get why you're maintaining a lot of information that you're not going to use. That's a *lot* of variable declarations in there, some of which aren't needed through the whole routine. There's also a lot that can make your code more compact and elegant. Case in point:

my %cookies; 
#lots more code
if (%cookies = fetch CGI::Cookie) {
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Can be elegantly compacted into

if ( my %cookies = fetch CGI::Cookie ) {
}
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( warning: these aren't entirely equivalent, but since you're only interested in %cookies within that if block, you shouldn't notice the difference here.)

Note also that

if (CONDITION1) { 
  if (CONDITION2) { 
  }
}
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is equivalent to

if (CONDITION1 && CONDITION2) {
}
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IMO, the second is much easier to follow.

The main thing you're looking for: you want to stop once you've found the right line in the "members" file. So use last -- not break ( some C coder musta misremembered) -- to break out of the loop. It's not really use strict that causes the complaint, it's the fact that the parser doesn't recognize break as a keyword, and so thinks it's a bareword, which causes strict to complain. In reality, it's a syntax error.

while( my($login, $junkfile) = split /\|!!\|, <FH>) {
 if ($login eq $id) {
     chomp $junkfile;
     $exact_match = $junkfile;
     last;
 }
}
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perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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