you can grep but that goes through the whole list: 
my $ct = scalar grep { $_ eq 'at' } @s;

[download]
Or you can look your self and break when you get a hit: 
my $found;
foreach ( @s ){
  next unless $_ eq 'at';
  $found = 1;
  last;
}

[download]
I would also suspect that List::Util has something useful..

Yet another option, if you're ok w/more or less doubling the memory and going through the whole list, is to hash it up (maybe useful elsewhere in your code so it's worth it?): 
  my %h;
  $h{$_}++ for @s;
  warn "got " . ($h{at}||0) . " hits for 'at'";

[download]

In reply to Re: searching a list by davidrw
in thread searching a list by keiusui

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