I have implemented your function and added a few things from the code above including Cody Pendent's /\s+/ suggestion. I should have thought of these myself since I have done similar stuff in the past.

The resulting Storable file is only a few thousand K more than my original text index file. Now all I need to do is implement a searcher. I may re-write this into an object structure for ease of maintence at some point but I like the way things are headed. I still need to add the stop list in a hash but I have some obligations I need to take care of today. I have appended the code with my changes below.

I still have one more question however. Why do I need so many chdir functions? It seems unable to deal with "\..\index" or any of that sort of stuff. Thanks again!

use strict;
use warnings;

use utf8;
use Storable;

chdir "texts";
my @files = glob "*.txt";
my %file_idx = map {; $_ => index_file( $_, 5 ) } @files;


chdir "\..";
chdir "index";
store \%file_idx, "text.idx";

=pod

{    'foobar.txt' => {
        word => [ 1, 3, 5, 6 ],
        another => [ 5, 7, 2, ] },
    'barfoo.txt' => {
        .......
}

=cut

sub index_file {
    my $filename = shift;
    my $lines_of_context =
        $_[0] > 0
        ? shift()
        : 1;
    open my $fh, "<", $filename or die "Couldn't open $filename: $!";

    my @offsets;
    my %index;
    while ( my $line = <$fh> ) {
        push @offsets, tell $fh;
        my $offset =
            scalar( @offsets ) < $lines_of_context
            ? $offsets[0]
            : shift @offsets;
        for my $word ( split /\s+/, $line ) {
        $word = lc $word;
        $word =~ s/,$|\.$|\[|\]|\(|\)|;|:|!//g;

        if(&inStopList($word)) {
        next;
        }elsif($word =~ /p\.(\d)+/) {
        next;
        }elsif($word =~ /\-{5,}?/) {
        next;
        }

            push @{ $index{$word} }, $offset;
        }
    }

    close $fh or warn "Couldn't close $filename: $!";
    return \ %index;
}

sub inStopList {
    my $word = shift;
    my @stopList = ("the", "a", "an", "of", "and", "on", "in", "by", "
+with", "at", "he", "after", "into", "their", "is", "that", "they", "f
+or", "to", "it", "them", "which");

    foreach my $stopWord (@stopList) {
    if($word eq $stopWord) {
        return $word;
    } else {
        next;
    }
    }
}
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