Can you comment a little more on your use of $first and $last (for example, why is it printing $last after matching $first)?

Also, it seems to me like your intent (note variable order/placement) for the regex is to have something like: 
if( $input =~ /$first/i ){ ... }

[download]

The first solution to come to mind for this is to leverage the 'strings' and 'grep' shell commands.. perhaps something like (and hopefully someone will post a pure-perl 'strings' equivalent--the 'grep' of course could be done in perl): 
# prompt for $filename
open HINTS, "Hints.txt" or die "Can't find file\n";
while( my $hintline = <HINTS> ){
  my ($first,$last) = split(/\ == /,$hints);
  my $results = `strings $filename | grep -i '$first'`;
  next unless length $results;
  printf "Found: %s\n", $last;
}
close HINTS;

[download]
This will also avoid binary-file issues, which i'm sure will be mentioned in other comments.

In reply to Re: Search Script by davidrw
in thread Search Script by arebc

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.