There are several problems with your code... As mdillon already pointed out you should chomp $input to remove the cr/lf. The other major error is in the following line: 
print "${line}";

[download]
That should read $line and not ${line}.

Now I've fixed your code (you can see my fixes below) to make it functional, but it still isn't very "perl" looking and has some needless code. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

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

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

[download]
Now here is a much more "perl-looking" implementation: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

print "Letter? ";
my $letter = <STDIN>;   
chomp $letter;
open (DATA, "books.txt") or die "error opening file $!";
my $line;
foreach $line(<DATA>) {
  if ($line =~ /^$letter/i) {
    print $line;
  }
}  
close DATA;

[download]

In reply to Re: Trying to make a search by lhoward
in thread Trying to make a search by zdog

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