Here's another take. It looks like you want to read an argument list for a program. It also looks like you are just using the file as a temporary test method to develop the prog, as I have followed in the example below. But you are possibly making life too complicated for yourself using a list to store what will in reality be a string of values or flags. When you come to use this code for real, to get arguments replace <FILE> with @ARGV at line 7. Alternatively, try using getopt::Std.

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $list = './argslist';    # test file of args
my @argstomatch = ('--hack','--and','--pray','--elephants');
my $srvr;
open (FILE, "<$list") or die "open $list failed: $!\n";
for(<FILE>){$srvr .= $_};     # append all lines together
close (FILE);
                # at this point we are done collecting - everything is
+ in one $srvr string
                # the rest demonstrates index
for $argfindme(@argstomatch)
    {
    printf ("%s\t%s\n", $argfindme, index($srvr,$argfindme));
    }
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You will see a number next to each argument in the @argstomatch list. This is -1 if the argument doesn't exist, otherwise it's the position of the first character of the match in $srvr.