Thank you very much R, It worked. :) I owe a big apology to people who tried to help me out because I found out that the string I was looking for in the "MY_FILE" file was "SREG_PORT" not "BASE_PORT". I have wasted your time and mine over some silly thing that I should have easily realized. Sorry gentlemen

Mr R, with right key word being searched the script I initially mentioned in my question also works but I do get that readline error message printed only once on the screen. I tried tweaking the scrit a bit but no luck. Im gonna use your script as it is very clean and solid, but Id still like to realize what I have done wrong to get that error.

following is the output when I run my version of script

supun  -->  40000
  sam  -->  25000
readline() on closed filehandle $fh at ./base_ports.pl line 11.
  binasha  -->  10000
  bundy -->  37000
  binjiya  -->  5000

[download]

Following is my version of script 

my $fname = 'MY_FILE';
my %users =  %{user_paths()};
foreach my $user (keys %users) {
        my $fh;
    if (-e "$users{$user}/$fname") {
    open ($fh, '<', "$users{$user}/$fname"); 
    while (my $line = <$fh>) { 
            if ($line =~ /S_REG_PORT_NO=(\d+)/) {
               print "  $user  -->  $1\n";
                
            }
        }
    }
  }

sub user_paths {
    my %users;
    open my $fh, '<', "/etc/passwd" || die "Can't Open : $!";
    while (<$fh>) {
        my @user = split (/:/);
        if ( $user[2] > 500 ) {
        $users{$user[0]} = "$user[5]";
                    
        }
    }
    return \%users;
    }

[download]

Only different thing Im doing here is that Im checking the existence of the file first with the "-e". Please help me figure this out. I just like to learn is all :) thanks again for helping out gentlemen.

In reply to Re^4: File reading with hashes by Bindo
in thread File reading with hashes by Bindo

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