in reply to Useless Program

You can make your scale better (to a file with a large number of names) by employing some sort of DB. In this case it also makes the code shorter. Here's your program using a tied hash to a SDBM file. All the modules you should need to do this are included with the perl install.
use Fcntl; use SDBM_File; my %db_names; tie (%db_names, 'SDBM_File', './names.db', O_RDWR | O_CREAT, 0666); print "Enter your name--> "; chomp (my $name = <STDIN>); if(defined $db_names{$name}){ print "Your name was already found\n"; }else{ print "Name not found. Would you like to add it? (y/n)--> "; chomp (my $yn = <STDIN>); if ($yn eq 'y') { $db_names{$name}=1; } } untie %db_names;