The easiest way would be to keep track of whether you have produced any output or not...

my $found = 0;

#for each line
while ($line = <EMPLOYEES>) {

    #remove the carriage return
    chomp $line;

    #splits the line between tabs and get the different elements
    ($name, $city, $language) = split /\t/, $line;

    next unless $language =~ /$search/;

    $found++;
    print "$name can speak " . ($search) .  " and lives in " . ($city)
+ . ".\n";
}
print "Found $found results.\n";
[download]

sub query {
    my $search = shift;
    while(my $line = <EMPLOYEES>) {
        if($line =~ /(.*?)\t(.*?)\t.*$search/) {
            return "$1 speaks $search and lives in $2";
        }
    }
    return "Sorry, nothin for ya";
}
        
print query("Norse");
[download]

There is one problem I see with this approach.

Unless I'm missing something I think you meant

 open(EMPLOYEES,'test.txt') or die;

  while (my $line = <EMPLOYEES>) {
    #remove the carriage return
    chomp $line;

    #splits the line between tabs and get the different elements
    my ($name, $city, $language) = split /\t/, $line;

    next unless $language =~ /$search/;

    print "$name can speak " . ($search) .
      " and lives in " . ($city) . ".\n";
  }

  print "Sorry, your query produced no results.\n" if (eof(EMPLOYEES))
+;
[download]

But the bigger problem using the eof approach is that if the match is last line of the file - you'll get the match printed and the 'Sorry' message.



grep

One dead unjugged rabbit fish later

Unless I'm missing something I think you meant

For some odd reason, I thought <EMPLOYEES> contained the query results. Don't try to make sense of it for I was completely wrong.