Greetings Brothers(and Sisters),

I am trying to set up a little application to search a file and return only the words that have the letters "a b o r t" in alphabetical order. I think I have managed to use .*? to get rid of any characters between these letters but now I am returning words that don't even have all of the letters in them. I know that the fix is likely very short but this is only my second week working in Perl, and I haven't been able to suss it out so far.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w 

use strict;

# seed files for <> operator
    @ARGV = qw( /usr/dict/words 
                );
while (<>) {
        # look for b e n(regardless of intervening characters)
        print if /a.*?b.*?o.*?r.*?t/;
    };

[download]
Thank you for any help,

Mox

In reply to Regular expression questions by chinamox

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