Why doesn't this work? It is supposed to go through a database and return the entries beginning with a certain letter. 

#!usr/bin/perl

my $data;
my $currentline;
my @data;

print "Letter? ";
$letter = <STDIN>;            
open (DATA, "books.txt");
@data = <DATA>;
$currentline = 0;
foreach $data(@data) {
    $line = @data[$currentline];
    if ($line =~ /^$letter/i) {
        print "${line}";
    }
$currentline++
}

[download]
It works fine every time I put a plain character between /^ and / instead of $letter. Why doesn't $letter work? Please help me out.

In reply to Trying to make a search by zdog

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