in reply to seek and process from there on

Perhaps you wanted something like this:
open STUFF, "<", $file or die "Can't open $file: $!"; while (<STUFF>) { chomp; $seen{internal_name}++, next if /^internal name/; if ($seen{internal_name}) { if (/^need this/) { # do your stuff here } } }
At the start, nothing is done until /^internal name/ is seen. If we see one, we just take note of that in a hash key, which we test later on when we get to do the real work. Update: I suddenly remembered there was a predefined DATA filehandle...