in reply to Unable to find a pattern

There are a number of things you ought to tidy up in your code. First off, always use strictures (use strict; use warnings;).

Use the three parameter version of open.

Avoid slurping files (@file=<FILE>;).

Use a precompiled regex instead of interpolating a string into a regex.

Early exits and statement modifiers work very well to eliminate excessive indentation (see next unless $_ =~ $find; below).

Multiple ! marks are a sure sign of a demented mind (although that may not be a programming tip). :-)

Consider the following reworked example:

use strict; use warnings; my $license = 'Wibble'; open FILE, '<', $license || die ("Could not open the file\n"); my $find = qr'license @abc'; while (<FILE>) { next unless $_ =~ $find; print "Found!\n"; print "$_\n"; }

Perl is environmentally friendly - it saves trees