G'day mnnb,

Welcome to the monastery.

I suspect you're very new to Perl and have guessed at most of the code you've posted here. Various inconsistencies also suggest you've borrowed code from other sources without understanding what they do.

Commenting out strict and warnings is a big mistake: it doesn't fix the reported issues; you've simply stuck your head in the sand and pretended they're not there.

I suggest you read perlintro. Follow the links you find there for further information on the various topics that are relevant to your current task and ask here if you don't understand.

From your problem description, here's how I might have tackled it.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @match_letters = 'A' .. 'E';
my @argv = qw{q w a s z x qwe wer zxcvb xcvbn};
my @re_pairs = map { [ qr{$argv[$_ * 2]}, qr{$argv[$_ * 2 + 1]} ] } 0 
+.. 4; 

while (<DATA>) {
    my $first_col = (split /\t/)[0];
    my $match_code = '';

    for my $i (0 .. 4) {
        if ($first_col =~ $re_pairs[$i][0] && $first_col =~ $re_pairs[
+$i][1]) {
            $match_code .= $match_letters[$i];
        }
    }

    print "$match_code: $_" if length $match_code;
}

__DATA__
qwerty  blah1
asdfgh  blah2
zxcvbn  blah3
[download]

Output:

AD: qwerty    blah1
B: asdfgh    blah2
CE: zxcvbn    blah3
[download]

As you can see, I've dummied up file and command line input and have only produced basic output. This may not be exactly what you want but should provide some direction: note, for instance, that I've only captured the first column not every tab-separated element; used a for loop instead of your deeply nested if statements; and, printed the original line read rather than attempting to recreate it from the split elements.

[For subsequent questions, please follow the guidelines in "How do I post a question effectively?": a better question gets better answers.]

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