If you add these lines at the start, you will find lots of useful messages:

use warnings; # needs 5.6.0 or newer,
# $^W = 1;    # for older
use strict;
[download]

The $search_for variable is only ever set to "Jan" because you assign it that way in my $search_for = $_[0];. I think you want to do something like this:

sub search_database {
    my $database = shift;
    my @search_for = map {qr/$_/i} @_;
    my @results;
    open(DB, $database) or die 'Error opening file: ', $!;
    while (<DB>) {
        my @record = split /::/;
        push @results, [@record]
            if grep {
                     $record[5]   # or whichever
                       =~ /$_/i;  # /o taken care of by qr
            } @search_for;
    }
    close DB or die $!;
    \@results;
}
[download]

After Compline,
Zaxo

It should probably be mentioned that since the sub now returns a reference, you'll need to call the function with something like:

my $resultsRef = search_database($dbName,@toy);
foreach my $result (@$resultsRef) {
  ...
}
[download]

Since an array reference is returned, you need to use '@$' to dereference the array.

-C

---

print(map(lc(chr),split(6,qw/99672682673683684689632658645641610607/)));

Agreed, Zaxo++. It should also be noted (as cal indicates that he is still new to Perl) for posterity's sake that passing arrays by reference is usually a Good Idea™. It eliminates the semantic clutter that often comes along with Perl's squishing the parameter list into one big list, and it is always faster to pass arrays by reference when passing anything but the most trivially sized arrays (which becomes crucial when dealing with Biggie-sized arrays on enterprise systems).