I second mkmcconns assumption that readMembers may not return an array, as a testrun with faked data did what it should do.

As a second note: You fetch every $active as many times as a $searchWord matches, maybe you'll want to say something like
(push(@found, $active) and last)if grep { /$searchWord/ } $newd;
to fetch a line only once (Just a thought).

regards,
tomte

---