Corion pointed to the probable most important mistake in your code. I would also add that $counter has also not been initialized (and not declared).

Your code is an perfect example of what is often called "baby Perl", i.e. code using only a small subset of the language. There is nothing derogative in this expression, quite to the contrary: beginners are encouraged to write scripts in baby Perl, this is the right way to start learning. And most monks here (including myself), perhaps all monks, have started this way.

I would like to offer a few possibly more "Perlish" ways of doing the same thing, but without trying to do too clever things:

@input = <INPUT>;
$query1_name = $input[0];
$query1 = $input[1];
$query2_name = $input[2];
# ...
$query4 = $input[7];
[download]

You may want to use a data structure rather than 8 variables. The eight code lines above can be replaced by:

my @query;
($query[$_]{name}, $query[$_]{content}) = @input[2*$_, 2*$_ + 1] for 0
+..3;
[download]

Which, for an @input array containing numbers fro 1 to 8, gives me the following data structure:

0  ARRAY(0x600500b60)
   0  HASH(0x600500a88)
      'content' => 2
      'name' => 1
   1  HASH(0x6005cffa8)
      'content' => 4
      'name' => 3
   2  HASH(0x6005cffd8)
      'content' => 6
      'name' => 5
   3  HASH(0x600635958)
      'content' => 8
      'name' => 7
[download]

This structure is called an array of hashes (AoH): it is an array of four elements, in which each element is a reference to a hash with two keys.

Similarly, you can change:

@query1 = split ('', $query1);
@query2 = split ('', $query2); 
@query3 = split ('', $query3);
@query4 = split ('', $query4);
[download]

to this:

$query[$_]{split_content} = [ split '', $query[$_]{content} ] for 0..3
+;
[download]

and for the lengths:

*
 $query[$_]{length} =  scalar  @{ $query[$_]{'split_content'}}  for 0.
+.3;
[download]

although I am not sure this is needed since you seem to be using only $length1, but this may be another bug. Now the data structure is looking like this:

0  ARRAY(0x600500b60)
   0  HASH(0x6005fdbb8)
      'content' => 2
      'length' => 1
      'name' => 1
      'split_content' => ARRAY(0x600635d30)
         0  2
   1  HASH(0x6005d0050)
      'content' => 4
      'length' => 1
      'name' => 3
      'split_content' => ARRAY(0x60063d850)
         0  4
   2  HASH(0x60063d928)
      'content' => 6
      'length' => 1
      'name' => 5
      'split_content' => ARRAY(0x6006360a8)
         0  6
   3  HASH(0x6006359d0)
      'content' => 8
      'length' => 1
      'name' => 7
      'split_content' => ARRAY(0x600636060)
         0  8
[download]

This:

while ($counter <= $length1) #...
[download]

might be better written:

for my $counter (0..$length1) { ...
[download]

which will do for you the incrementation missing in your code.

I won't go further into your code, but I would add that you should should take the habit of declaring all your variables (with the my operator) and to insert the following pragmas at the top of your programs:

use strict;
use warnings;
[download]

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