hi,thanks for the answer. i wasnt able to apply what you wrote. i tried what you wrote and debbugged it with ptkdb,it seems the file is reopened, but on reading from it with $buff=<new_handle_same_file> it seems $buff is undef over and over again. about it beeing useful ... i dunno , its just an exercice randal schwartz's book learning perl , actually its from chapter 9 exercice 5,that goes with the 4th edition that i own of the book. ok...i managed to surpass the problem ,not even reading the file the 2nd time as i was planning to,and making it like this http://perlhobby.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/scripturi_perl_teste/prob_leraning_perl/p9_5.pl it seems next magically jumps the line on wich the text to be checked in the file is supposed to be and thats how i get over the problem. i would be very interested to see how one could jump to the next FILE the diamond operator is processing, that would optimize the solution much better.