Your example #4 is what I had tried first, but without the ".*" parts. I'm still not sure why they're needed. What I thought I was asking for was a match with any digit no matter where it was in the string. My bad.

At this point, after adding the ".*", it's doing just what I expected. Hurray!

As to the need for ++$i; don't I need to change the offset each time I read the file in order to step further into the file to get the next digit? You seem to be implying that that's unneeded. Does sysread auto-increment it's own offset when it's used in a loop? If I just remove the ++, I get a runaway loop, so I guess not. What did you have in mind, please?

I could leave it just the way it is, but I'd rather understand sysread a little better.

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