Hello Anonymous Monk,

I think/assume you want to know the line number as you read the file. If so no need to use counters etc, Perl has got your back. Use the perlvar/Variables related to filehandles/$.. Then combine it with a hash as the fellow monks has provided you with several examples.

Sample of code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature qw(say);

while (<>) {
    chomp;
    say $. . "\t" . $_;
}

__END__

$ perl test.pl test_1.txt
1    Line 1
2    Line 2
3    Line 3
[download]

Hope this helps, BR.