This is a little better (but not tested):

NAME: foreach my $name ( @name_array ) { FILE: foreach my $file ( @files ) { open my $fh, '<', $file or die "Can't read '$file': $!"; while ( my $line = <$fh> ) { chomp $line; if ( lc $line eq lc $name ) { print OUTPUTFILE "$line\n"; next FILE; } } } }

Note a few things:

The way you're trying to do it with regular expressions means that you'll end up matching partial names with full names (i.e., "Fred" will match "Frederick" and "Liam" will match "William"). If that's what you want, fine. You can say $line =~ /\Q$wanted_name/ and get that (see also quotemeta).

If you want each name to be found only once regardless of how many files it's in, you can change my "next FILE" to "next NAME" to skip over other files once the name is found.

Update: I also Use strict and warnings


In reply to Re: Nested foreach problem by kyle
in thread Nested foreach problem by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.