Thanks a lot!!
I guessed that loading the complete file into a variable will be bad practice...thanks for pointing out the better method. I got this idiom  my $lines = do { local $/; <STATFILE> }; from perlfaq5 but I confess that I did not understand how it works. I just had a vague idea that for using multi-line regexp, there should be multiple lines in the variable. But I am curious to know how it works, especially about "do" and "local".
And also thanks for the tipoff on  <DATA> :)

In reply to Re^2: multiple regexp matches in multi line string by wirelesscharlie
in thread multiple regexp matches in multi line string by wirelesscharlie

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