>>Jamaica responding<< The $LookFor is a string to be used as the regexp. Yes, it is the pattern to match. I've tried using \b but did not get any results. If I leave off the ^ and $, my search goes thru but it include other matches, which I don't want. I'm trying to do a search on my log files, and a typical filename would be fileis.2003.07.box1 or fileis.2003.07.box11 I tried using qr// but it too did not work. Yes I use strict; and yes, I verified that all the string/variable names are spelled correctly. Thanks for the help everyone. I need it! So this is what I have... (this isn't all of it but this should give you basic idea w/out me having to dump everything here) 
    if ($srch_file) {
        $LookFor .= "$^srch_file.*?";  
    }
        else {
        $LookFor .= '^[A-Za-z]+?';
    }

    if ($srch_year) {
        $LookFor .= "\.$srch_year";
    }
    else {
        $LookFor .= '\.\d+?';
    }

    if ($srch_month) {
        $LookFor .= "\.$srch_month";
    }
    else {
        $LookFor .= '\.\w+?';
    }

    if ($srch_host) {
        $LookFor .= "\.$srch_host"; 
    }
    else {
        $LookFor .= '\.\w+?'; 
    }

    print "Looking in:\n";  #look in the specified dir paths set in th
+e search_dirs
    foreach (@Search_Dirs) {
        print "\t$_/\n"; #print out dir paths that it searched
    }
    print "For file names matching: /$LookFor/\n"; #print out the file
+ names that matches

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In reply to Re: Regexp - exact matches by kingstonian
in thread Regexp - exact matches by kingstonian

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