I'm wondering how often Skyler or Skyler99 is going to show us his code...

Sorry for being a bit off topic.

Skyler or Skyler99, try the perl debugger an see how the program works. Maybe you have a fundamental misunderstanding and the use of the debugger might help you.

Call it with
    perl -d your-program's-filename

Then you step through it by hitting once
    s[RETURN]
and just
    [RETURN]
for each next step. From time to time try a
    x $your-variable's-name
to see what's in your variables.

You stop debugging by entering
    q.

HTH