I do appreciate the suggestions. I like what you have much more than what I had.

As to your last question that is just what UBB does. That is not something that I do. It is something that seems slow for my use, but I have to work with what they have given me. Again, Thanks.

My code as stands is now the following taking information from all of the above users. Thanks to those. This works and the subroutine will return either undef or the users id.

#!d:\perl\bin\perl.exe -w
use strict;
use CGI;
use CGI::Cookie;

print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
my $user = get_userid();
print "UNDEF" if($user eq undef);
print "<p>whoa whoa whao $user" if($user ne undef);

sub get_userid {
  my $member_dir = "../../Members/";
  my $member_file ="memberslist.cgi";

  return undef unless my %cookies = CGI::Cookie->fetch;
  return undef unless $cookies{'UserName'} and $cookies{'Password'};

  my $id = $cookies{'UserName'}->value;
  my $password =  $cookies{'Password'}->value;

  my $exact_file;
  my $file = "$member_dir/$member_file";
  open (FH, "< $file") or die "Could not open $file: $!";
  while( my($login, $junkfile) = split /\|!!\|/, <FH>) {
    if ($login eq $id) {
       chomp $junkfile;
       $exact_file = $junkfile;
       last;
    }
  }

  close FH;

  return undef unless $exact_file;

  $file ="$member_dir/$exact_file.cgi";
  open (FH, "< $file") or die "Could not open $file";
  chomp (my @user_list= (<FH>, <FH>));
  close FH;
  return undef unless $user_list[0] eq $id and
         $user_list[1] eq $password;

  return $id;
}
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