help us to help you giving runnable and correctly indented code :)

Your perLplexing issue can arise from wrong index 1 (instead of 2) in $field[1] ? Use Data::Dump here and there to verify data you are processing.

The following works as expected

use strict;
use warnings;

my @lines = <DATA>;
@lines = map {chomp $_; $_} @lines;

my $indtwn = <STDIN>;
# $indtwn = <STDIN> until defined $indtwn; ???
chomp $indtwn;

my $found = 0;

foreach my $townverify (@lines) {
    my @field = split(':',$townverify);
    next if $field[0] =~ m/^#/;
    if ( $field[2] eq $indtwn ){             # <--- here
        print "FOUND $indtwn\n";
        $found++;
        last;
    }
}

print "[$indtwn] NOT FOUND" unless $found;

__DATA__
1:PGH:Pittsburgh
2:PGHW:Pittsburgh West End
[download]

L*