There are better ways to clean this up (as already pointed out) but generally it is a good idea to avoid explicit C style loops. For instance instead of:

for ($i=1 ;$i<=$number ; $i++) {
  ...
}
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you can write:

foreach $i (1..$count) {
  ...
}
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which executes faster, and tends to result in less chance of fencepost errors. And of course I would never write a loop like that, I would instead do:

foreach my $i (1..$count) {
  ...
}
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which plays better with strict. (Which it doesn't look like you are using, but is a very helpful habit to get into.)