What a piece of garbage code! What on earth are you doing with @hold? Just do something like:

    open my $fh => "linecount.txt" or die "Open linecount.txt: $!";
    my ($file, $linecount);
    while (<$fh>) {
        ($file, $linecount) = split /\s*~\s*/;        
        last if $file && $file eq $thefileIamLookingfor;
    }
[download]

Abigail