I would also suggest to pass the path to the file as an argument. You can always define a default as a constant in the top of your script where it is easy to find and change if needed. That's more maintainable than hardcoding a path in a subroutine

use constant DEFAULT_FILE => "/etc/filesystems";
my $file = shift || DEFAULT_FILE; # e.g. to take file from command lin
+e or use the default
find_pattern($file, $pattern);

sub find_pattern {
  my ($file, $pattern) = @_;
  # your code here
}

[download]

Another general advise would be to separate the test and the action. Ideally, a subroutine "find_pattern" should return true if it found it and false if it didn't. For example next time you might want to terminate a script rather than print to STDOUT:

...
die "oh no, it's not there!" unless find_pattern($file, $pattern);

sub find_pattern {
  my ($file, $pattern) = @_;
  return `grep $pattern $file`;
}

[download]

In reply to Re: subroutine to search a pattern in a file by tospo
in thread subroutine to search a pattern in a file by dilip_val

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