thanks for all the help - here is what I came up with. this allows me to navigate a text file and put together a minimized version of it. Instead of 27,008 rows I can get it down to 50 rows of data I am focused on. Thanks a lot!

#!perl 
use tie::file


my $count = 0;

tie @array, 'Tie::File', 'log.txt' or die;

my $index = 0;
foreach my $line (@array) {

  if ($line =~ m/Age: 3/i) {
  
    my $age = @array[$index];
    my $var1 = @array[$index-4];
    my $var2 = @array[$index+6];
    my $var3 = @array[$index+7];
    
    

    if ($var2 =~ m/Added to non/i) {
    print "$var1\n"; 
    print "$age\n";
    print "$var2\n";
    print "-----------------\n";
    }
    
    if ($var3 =~ m/Added to non/i) {
    print "$var1\n"; 
    print "$age\n";
    print "$var3\n";
    print "-----------------\n";
    }    
    

    }
    
  $index++;
}


untie @array;
[download]

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