Please, please, please. Reading in all lines of a file into an array is standard idiom. Do not use such a silly, inefficient, routine. And NEVER EVER forget to check the return value of open.

Here's how you read the file into an array:

    open my $fh => $file or die "Open failed: $!";
    my @array = <$fh>;
    close $fh;
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If you want to chomp of newlines, add the following line:

    chomp @array;
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Don't reinvent the wheel. And don't code perl primitives in Perl.

Abigail