UPDATE: New code that only uses ONE gzgrep

Hi,

I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but if I do, then this should do what you want

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

my $y = 'Eclipse';
my $p = 'myfile.gz';

# x will contain the line(s) that contain y
my $x = `gzgrep $y $p`;

unless ( $x ){
     print "could not find exact case, but...\n";
     $x = `gzgrep -i $y $p`;
}

if ($x) {
    print "found:\n$x\n";
}
else {
    print "nothing found\n";
}
[download]

You should note that using backticks (rather than the system command) will return the result of the system command (what is normally written to the terminal) rather than the exit code.

The exception to this is error messages. Unless you specifically redirect stderr to stdin, stderr will still be displayed on the screen, and will not be captured by $x

Only one gzgrep!

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

my $y = 'Eclipse';
my $p = 'myfile.gz';

my @x; 
my $z;
@x = grep /$y/, $z= `gzgrep -i $y $p`;

if ( @x ){
    print "found @x\n";
}
else {
     print "could not find exact case, but...\n";
     if ($z) {
        print "found:\n$z\n";
     }
     else {
        print "found nothing\n";
    }
}
[download]