Since this program removes any trailing dot on lines that contain some particular string, i don't see why you named it ident.pl ... but that's okay. Here is some code that does the same thing as yours, but does so more consisely: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my ($file,$var) = @ARGV;
die "USAGE: $0 file word\n" unless $file and $var;

open GETARG, '<', $file or die "Can't open $file: $!\n";
while (<GETARG>) {
   s/\.$// if /$var/;
   print;
}

close GETARG or die "Couldn't close $file: $!\n";

[download]
Also, if you don't mind "hard coding" the word you want to match in the code, this can be trimmed down to a one liner: (remember to replace the double quotes with single quotes if you use Win32) 
perl -pe's/\.$// if /word/' file

[download]
Perl rules. :)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

In reply to (jeffa) Re: ident.pl by jeffa
in thread killlastdot.pl by hash

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