I have a file with 40K lines. I want to search the entire file and return only the entires with a string "xxx" in it. Furthermore, I want to e-mail the "xxx" events that contain "yyy" or "zzz" or "aaa". I have the code that identified the lines with "xxx", and have the code working with the "yyy", but I want to change it from a variable containing "yyy" to a hash that can be updated to contain everything... i.e. @emailcrit=("yyy","zzz","aaa"); I've tried this, but when I chnage it from $emailcrit (the old variable containing "yyy") to @emailcrit, it breaks. Any ideas?