The following script pings a bunch of addresses. If it fails it writes to file "miss" which works fine. The problem is if I use this file "miss" in another perl script i.e. open, and do "if exists" against hash with its contents it always fails if. however I can use vi and write the exact same content and the script works! What mystery characters are being passed? See earlier question from this morning (read value from file won't pass if exists??). Second script at bottom. this reads miss and compares to hash. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
my $dir="/home/lcollins";
system "/bin/cat /dev/null > $dir/miss";
open (HOSTS,"$dir/ClockIP") or die "Can't open HOSTS $!";
open (MISS,">>$dir/miss") or die "Can't open miss $!";
my $miss=<MISS>;
while (<HOSTS>) {
chomp;
@args = ("/bin/ping $_ -c 2");
system(@args) == 0
                or print MISS "$_\n"
}
print "Done.";

[download]
Look in hash for stuff from miss. (sorry for all the code). 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
my $dir="/home/lcollins";
open MISS, "$dir/miss" or die "can't open $!";
%clocks=(
"start"=>"000",
"10.1.0.15"=>"0",
"10.20.20.13"=>"1FL Sadlier",
"10.20.11.15"=>"Convent",
"10.20.44.15"=>"1 Cooke",
"10.20.44.16"=>"2 Cooke",
"10.20.46.36"=>"6 Cooke",
"10.20.46.37"=>"4 Cooke",
"10.20.46.38"=>"5 Cooke",
"10.3.0.15"=>"Beacon",
"10.3.0.16"=>"Beacon",
"10.4.0.15"=>"9G",
"10.6.0.15"=>"Comm Diss",
"END"=>"000"
);
my $miss=<MISS>;
#chomp $miss;
#print "Before loop $miss\n";
foreach (<MISS>){
chomp;
#print "in loop $_ \n";
if (exists $clocks{$_}){
        print "$_ is down\n";
}
close MISS;
}

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In reply to Print to a file then use file content for test? by lcollins

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