Nifty... I didn't know that the flip flop returned anything other than 1 or 0.

% perl -lne 'printf "%-6s  %s\n", $_, scalar(/^banana$/ ..  /^grape$/)
+' fruit.txt
apple   
banana  1
pear    2
peach   3
grape   4E0
orange
[download]

So, I can tweak my one-liner to exclude the endpoints like so:

% perl -ne 'print unless (/^banana$/ ..  /^grape$/) =~ /^1?$|E/' fruit
+.txt
pear
peach
[download]

Update:
Doh!, runrigs second stanza was added while I was replying.... I guess obfuscated minds think alike. ;-)

-Blake