in reply to to find an index of a particular value in an array

If you do this search regularly, why not create a hash of the ips?

use strict; use warnings; my @contents= <DATA>; # indexing your content my %index; @index{ map((/address=(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/), @contents) }= 0..$#conte +nts; # beware! will fail if no address in a line! # retrieving an index my $i= $index{'127.0.0.1'}; print defined($i) ? $i : "not found"; __DATA__ # SNMP manager 1 settings manager.1.address=127.0.0.1 manager.1.port=1 +62 manager.1.version=2 manager.1.community=public # SNMP manager 1 settings manager.1.address=127.0.2.1 manager.1.port=1 +62 manager.1.version=2 manager.1.community=public # SNMP manager 1 settings manager.1.address=127.0.3.1 manager.1.port=1 +62 manager.1.version=2 manager.1.community=public

$\=~s;s*.*;q^|D9JYJ^^qq^\//\\\///^;ex;print