Thank you both so much. I'm impressed with the helpfulness and promptness of this forum. Below is the end result. Of course the last two printf() statements are kind of silly, I was just using them to make sure the script would work. Both of the printf() calls will be changed to system() in order to send out an email notification. There is no SMART equivelant for cciss drivers in FreeBSD so this will keep an eye on things. 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @args;
our $F;

@args = ("cciss_vol_status /dev/ciss0 > checkstatres.txt");
system(@args);

open RESULTS, "checkstatres.txt" or die "can't open datafile: $!\n";
while (<RESULTS>){
        my @F=split(/:/, $_);
        if ( $F[2] =~ /OK./){
                printf (" it's okay\n");
        }
        else{
                printf (" it's not ok\n");
        }
}

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In reply to Re^2: specific field selection by javpra
in thread specific field selection by javpra

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