First please follow the advice Corion said above: use warnings; and also add use strict; line. Notice that if warnings are not clear to you you can temporarly add use diagnostics;

As already said the if ($.=<>) is confusing and probably nonsense: with = you are assigning to $. what the diamond operator <> is spitting out!

See the diamond operator explained to know it better.

In a check, when you would say "if this is equal to that" you must use == for numbers and eq for strings.

Improve your code with suggestions received until now and see what it happens; then feel free to reply to this threads for more questions.

L*