Errr... something that springs to mind is that you create a cgi object $q (lovely), and then proceed to ignore it and do all your HTML by hand. wtf (that's why, not what :-). I suggest you read the CGI docs and maybe take a look at a couple of my recent posts.

Anyway, apart from that (slap), if you insist on hand crafting inputs, please ="quote values" - you'll understnad why if you ever have a value that contains a space!

You say 3 lines is the delimiter, so why:

$/="\n\n";

# instead of
$/="\n\n\n";
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?

OK, a few more notes. Here's how I'd parse (without rewriting this massively ;-)

if ( $q->param() ) {
  open (FH, "$path_to_text") or die "where's the damn file? : $!";

  # also set this in earlier part to match
  $/="\n\n\n";   #set the input Record seperator to a TPIPLE newline

  my @updated_text;
  while (<FH>) {
    next if /^\n+$/;                  #ignore lines which contains onl
+y newlines
    $post_number++;

    # ignore deleted
    next if ( $q->param("box$post_number") );

    # keep the rest
    push @updated_text, $_;
  }
  close(FH);

  # now update file
  open(FH,">$path_to_text") || die $!;
  print FH join "\n\n\n", @updated_text;
  close(FH);

  # show success here...
}
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hth

cLive ;-)