By rewind he means seek FILE, 0, 0, so that the next read is at the beginning of the file.

And by reverse the loops, he means change: 

foreach $term (@inputs) {
  while (<FILE>) {

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to 
while (<FILE>) {
  foreach $term (@inputs) {

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I'm going to add a few unrelated points:
Always:

use warnings;
use strict;

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In fact, you probably have a bug of "filenumbers2" vs. "numbers2" that use strict would catch.

Instead of

  push @before, split(' ', $`);

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you should have
  @before = split(' ', $`);

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Then you don't need the awkward @before = undef; The same holds for @after, too.

Really it should be

my @before = split /\s+/, $`;

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The three lines
@before = reverse(@before);
@before = splice(@before, 0, 7);
@before = reverse(@before);

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are better written as splice(@before, 0, -7);. And this code:
  if(exists $results{$number}) {
  $existing = $results{$number}; 
  $results{$number} = $existing . "... @before" . "<b>$&</b>" . "@afte
+r ...";
  } else {
  $results{$number} = "... @before" . "<b>$&</b>" . "@after ";
  }

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can be written as 
$results{$number} .= "... @before" . "<b>$&</b>" . "@after ";

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

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