Hello, thank you so much for your help and guidance, I am very new to this forum. I was able to get this working, and you are correct, I had filecount in there from the code I was using to start out, and focused mainly on the regex problems. I was able to get it to do exactly what was needed on the test data I presented, then realized the reason it wasn't working on the actual data file I need to parse, is because I have .s in the second word, and that second word always ends with a dot. (.s) This works for the orignal test data: 
use warnings;
use strict;

my $infn = '/Users/azeller/Documents/Rogers_import/20190822_RR_export-
+nrcmd.txt';
open(my $infh, '<', $infn) or die "$infn: $!";

my $outfh;
my $filecount = 0;
while ( my $line = <$infh> ) {
        if ( $line =~ /^zone\s+(\w+)\W+\w+\s*$/ ) {
                close $outfh if $outfh;
                my $outfn = sprintf '%sdb', $1;
                open($outfh, '>', $outfn) or die "$outfn: $!";
        }
        if ($outfh) {
                print {$outfh} $line or die "print: $!";
        }
}

close($outfh) if $outfh;
close($infh);

[download]
But it doesn't work for the actual data I am parsing. My data file format is actually more like the following: 
one 1file1.nest.  1ss
record1a
record1b
record1c
record    1d    2
record    empty
endoffile

zone 2file2.egg.  1ss
record1a
record1b
record1c
record    1d    2
record    empty
endoffile

[download]

In reply to Re^2: Using the second word in a line to split a file into multiple files by az1962
in thread Using the second word in a line to split a file into multiple files by az1962

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