why not move everything to a function and let the function return the index where the data is found?

sub search{
  my ($item,$end) = @_;
  my $i;
  my $found = 1;
  foreach $i (0..$end)
  {
      if (some condition on the list){
          return ($found, $i);
      }
  }
  return (0,0);
}
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since perl supports multiple return values, we could return $found as well if someone wants it.