It looks like you never assigned $line to anything, and are searching its contents, which are undefined. You may be getting confused about how Perl's default $_ is used in pattern matching. The program would do what you want if you left off the variable my $line and changed the if statement to read:

if ( /A-Za-z/ )

... since $_ has the line data in it, not $line. Or conversely you could put the line data into the variable like this...

while( my $line = <FH> ) {
    if ( $line =~ m/A-Za-z/ ) {
        ....
    }
}
close FH

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In reply to Re: Special Variable help by andmott
in thread Special Variable help by utterlyconfused

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