you are talking of matching multiple lines, to be frank, I am new to Perl too and I am not sure if I heard this right "an array of multiple lines" , what I understand is it does not embed new line characters in it and that its length is a one line that spans multiple screen lines, but probably you wanna make your array into a string as many wise monks have suggested and then extend the search pattern to go through multiple lines, to be wholesome, and soon as a match occurs it exits the conditional loop....so I will add to the suggested ideas this loop here too in which a string with new line characters iis being matched and not an array.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $match=0;
my $string = "do you know my name is Simon\n I have a clock  on my wal
+l";

while(){
        if($string=~ /\bclock\b/s){
                $match++;
                last;
                }else{last;}
        }
$match ? print "Found Pattern!\n":print "did not find pattern!\n";
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