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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