#1

Please comment your code, then it would be easier to know what it is supposed to do (as opposed to what it actually does)

I'm not sure what it is you are doing with HASHDATAFROMBATCHFILE, but I will ignore that for now.

#2

what's wrong with the quotes extraction since i don't want them there.

My output is different than yours, and appears to work based on the above statement.

My source code (same as yours, but reads input from __DATA__, and deleted the unused hash)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $counter;
while (my $line = <DATA>)
   {
      chomp($line);
      print "B |$line|\n";
      if ($line =~ m/-(.*) ["]*([\)\(A-Za-z0-9,\.\*]*)\s*["]*\s*/)
      {
         print "$counter $1 $2\n";
      }
      if ($line =~ m/\bEND\b/)
      {
         $counter ++;
      }
   }

__DATA__
   -libs "source*.lib"
   -1dlu 
   -2dlu 
   -3dlu "(1,1,3)"
   -filter  ASDF
END
[download]

My output (using Active State Perl 5.6.1 on WinNT)

B |   -libs "source*.lib"|
 libs source*.lib
B |   -1dlu |
 1dlu 
B |   -2dlu |
 2dlu 
B |   -3dlu "(1,1,3)"|
 3dlu (1,1,3)
B |   -filter  ASDF|
 filter  ASDF
B |END|
[download]

Sandy