Perhaps you should tell us what you are trying to do. What you should do though is use strict; use warnings; and then explicitly declare your variables so that you and the compiler and we all understand what the various variables' scopes should be. I suspect that once you have done that you will then add some code to reset various variables, perhaps at the top of the main loop. But because I can't guess exactly what you want to do, you will have to figure that out for yourself :)