Eek! You really *must* wrap your code in <code> and </code> tags to make it readable! Take a gander at the Site How To. Some of your filehandles got 'eaten' (well, aren't displayed, since the browser interprets them as HTML tags it's never seen before).

You seem to have the basic structure down for what you need to do (you could use a DBM file and tie to get your file to behave like a hash, then all you'd have to do is search for a matching hash key and delete that -- but that would be major retooling, suitable for v 2.0 =) Here's one way to do it (that turns on the key field being the first one in the line!):

open OLD, $file or die "Can't open $file:$!\n";
open NEW, ">$file.new" or die "Can't open temp file $file.new: $!\n";
my $found =0;
while (<OLD>) {
    if (/^$username\t/) {
        $found =1;
        next; # skips to the next line, so won't print
            # any matching line to the new file
    }
    print NEW; # implicit "$_"
}
if ($found) {
    rename ($file, "$file.old") or die "Can't back up old $file: $!\n"
+;
    rename ("$file.new", $file) or die "Can't rename new $file: $!\n";
} else {
    print "I didn't find $username!\n";
}
[download]

HTH.

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor