As mentioned it is hard to read your code, it is long, it does not use strict and warnings, it does not adhere to the smallest possible test case ideal. That said a couple of hints to tidy things up.

It does look like you are taking each business and then comparing all the file entries against it before reading the next business off the array. This means you are reading the input files $number_of_business times. Reading the file is slow, itterating through an array held in memory is fast.

• For getting a formatted date/time consider use POSIX; and the strftime function that provides.

perl -MPOSIX -le'print strftime "%X %x", localtime(time)'
12:28:59 18/03/05
[download]

• If you need to match each line against all those businesses consider building an array of pre-compiled regex using the qr command and then read each line in turn and run it against each compiled regex 'till you get a match (assuming only one business can match each line)

If I missed the boat completely sorry.

Hopefuly this code can give you a couple of ideas ...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my @businesses=(
                ['foo', 'bar', 'baz'],
                ['een', 'twee', 'drie'],
                ['ichi', 'ni', 'san'],
                ['hydrogen', 'helium', 'lithium'],
);
my %regexen;

foreach my $group (@businesses) {
    print "making regex from group @{$group} ... ";
    my $regex=join "|", @$group;
    print "\\$regex\\\n";
    my $compiled_re=qr/$regex/;
    $regexen{$regex}=$compiled_re;
}

while (my $line = <DATA>) {
    for my $group (keys %regexen) {
        next unless $line =~ /$regexen{$group}/;
        print "The line $line matched the bussiness group $group\n";
    }
}

__DATA__
nosuch
foo
this
that
helium
ballon
ichi
foot
een
[download]

Cheers,
R.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.