while (my $words = <DICT>) {
    chomp $words;
    push @matches, $words if $words =~ /a$/
}
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Update: With CountZero's caveat, the second example will work fine on windows. That is Perl's internal grep, not the unix system utility of the same name. Perl chomp removes whatever $/ is from the end of a string - by default that is the native newline.

After Compline,
Zaxo

The grep solution slurps the whole dictionary file as one list and can make for a huge process if the dictionary is large.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

Thanks for the information Zaxo. The first example cuts down a lot of code I had plan to use. I can't really use the second example because I need this to work on both windows and unix, though eventually it will be unix only. However the words are still missing when the search is started. Here is the code...

use strict;
use warnings; 

my @matches = ();

open (DICT, "dictionary.txt") or die "Dictionary.txt: $!\n";

while (my $words = <DICT>)
{
    chomp $words;
    
    push @matches, $words . " 1" if $words =~ /a$/;    
    push @matches, $words . " 2" if $words =~ /.*[i].*[i].*[i].*[i].*[
+i].*/gi;
    push @matches, $words . " 3" if $words =~ /[^aeiou]/gi;
    my $reverse = reverse($words);
    push @matches, $words . " 4" if $words eq $reverse;    
}

close (DICT);

foreach (@matches)
{
    print $_;
}
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Regarding this issue:

I need this to work on both windows and unix

The safest way to remove line terminations across platforms is:

s/[\r\n]+//;
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For that matter, you could probably just do s/\s+//g; based on the assumption that the only white space to be found in your dictionary file is the line breaks.

You might want to check to see if the words are there inside of the while loop. A simple print statement like

print "----$words-----\n";
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inserted after the chomp statement may detect the problem.

Abigail

Thanks a lot for everybodies input. I'm not sure why the chomp function was not working correctly but it is working correctly now which solved most of the other problems I was having. I have one more question... Is there a way to match words with double letters.. ex keenness or mississippi? Also is there a way to match words that are in alphabetical order.. ex abby or abit? Thanks so much for your help. =0)

For double letters:

if ($word =~ /(.)\1/) ...
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All letters in alphabetical order (not regex):

if (lc($word) eq join "", sort split //, lc($word));
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antirice    
The first rule of Perl club is - use Perl
The ith rule of Perl club is - follow rule i - 1 for i > 1