!novice alert! pardon me, I realize this is more than likely a very simple question, however, I cannot (for the life of me) figure out why it doesn't work. I want to store the pattern of the apache log and IIS log format in a regex type thing ($apache_log and $iis_log). I would also like to store a string ($docuement and $document2) that happens to be something I am looking for in the document (i.e. index.html or a specific query). but my silly little script doesn't appear to work very well, ANY help would be greatly appreciated. here is some code to do roughly what I am thinking: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$apache_log="/(.*)\s+-\s+-\s+\[(\d+)\/(\w+)\/(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)/";
# Hmm I know there is a better way to parse this
$iis_log="/(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)\s+(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)\s/";

$document="/report.html\?/";
$document2="/secret.html\?/";

# open the log file - the log file we want to check out
open(LOG, "<$ARGV[0]") || die("Could not open $ARGV[0] : $!");

# open our Report file - the file we will write out report to
open(REPORT, ">$ARGV[1]") || die("Could not open $ARGV[1] : $!");

while(<LOG>){
 if($document){
  ($ip, $day, $month, $year, $hr, $min) = $_ = $apache_log; # if I was
+ using IIS I would set this to $iis_log, is there a better way?
  $totaldoc++;
  print REPORT "Access on doc1 from: $ip on $month $day at $hr:$min\n"
+;
 } elsif($document2){  
  $totaldoc2++; 
  print REPORT "Access on doc2 from: $ip on $month $day at $hr:$min\n"
+;
 }
}

print REPORT "Total doc1: $totaldoc\n";
print REPORT "Total doc2: $totaldoc2\n";
close(LOG);
close(REPORT);

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In reply to question about regex and using a scalar variable to store/call it by Anonymous Monk

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