You open your file just inside the if, then read the entire file in the while loop. Then next time through the foreach $term(@inputs) { loop, there is nothing left to read so it exits the loop immediatly.

You have a few options:

  1. Reverse the while and foreach loops, so it loops through @inputs for each line read. or:
  2. Rewind the file after the while loop.
  3. If the file is small enough, read the entire thing into memory, and use a second foreach loop instead of the while

I don't know if it matters to you which order you get your matches, nor if the files are small enough, so I'm not sure which option would be better in this case.

Update: You might also want to reformat your code to make it easier to see where each block ends. Running your code through perltidy produces the following: 

sub findtext {
    @filenumbers = @_;
    foreach $number (@filenumbers) {
        push @filenumbers2, split(/\W/, $number);
    }
    foreach $number (@numbers2) {
        chomp $number;
        if (defined $number) {
            open(FILE, "/home/jroberts/$number.txt") or die "$!";
            foreach $term (@inputs) {
                while (<FILE>)
                    if (/\b($term)\b/i) {
                    push @before, split(' ', $`);
                    @before = reverse(@before);
                    @before = splice(@before, 0, 7);
                    @before = reverse(@before);
                    push @after, split(' ', $');
                    @after = splice(@after, 0, 7);
                    if (exists $results{$number}) {
                        $existing = $results{$number};
                        $results{$number} =
                            $existing . "... @before" . "<b>$&</b>" .
                            "@after ...";
                    } else {
                        $results{$number} =
                            "... @before" . "<b>$&</b>" . "@after ";
                    }
                    @before = undef;
                    @after  = undef;
                    next;
                    } else {
                    print "No Match\n";
                    next;
                }
            }
            print "Match found in $number.txt\n";
            @fulltext = $results{$number};
            print "@fulltext\n";
            close(FILE);
        } else {
            next;
        }
        next;
    }
}

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In reply to Re: Pattern Matching With Regular Expressions by Paladin
in thread Pattern Matching With Regular Expressions by Anonymous Monk

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