Besides the above comment, I also didn't see anything even in your mangled code that reads the file. Must have that. And if you expect more than one line to be scanned by a regex, you have to read a bunch of lines: 
open FOO, "somewhere" or die "cannot open somewhere: $!";
$_ = join "", <FOO>;
if (/
(?:^|\n)       # Start matching either at the start of the string 
                # or at a newline. The ?: part means, that 
                # the parentheses I use don't get saved in $1 
  \.(\w+).+\n   # match a line starting with a dot-word and some 
                # more stuff 
  \t+\.\w+      # The line after this must start with at least one 
                # tab and then a dot-word 
  \W+(\w+)      # and contain some other stuff as well ... 
/mx ) {
  ... you found one ...
}

[download]
Something like that.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to Re: Multi-line regex by merlyn
in thread Multi-line regex by saty

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