not sure if you need anything fancy....something like (unix code) 
grep $phone_num file1 file2 file3

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...sitting behind a primitive gui should do it. you can get a (standalone..without cygwin) grep.exe for windows as well. if you must call it from perl then just wrap inside backticks and assign the output to a variable 
my $result = `grep $phone_num file1 file2 file3`;
if($result) {
  print "number is in blocked list";
}

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the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H

In reply to Re: Searching text files by aquarium
in thread Searching text files by SteveS832001

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