Cirollo is right. and you want to be careful about where your hash is defined. if it's created inside the while loop, it will be regenerated after every match of the $userid. if it's created outside the while loop, you can add info to it and do your processing after the while loop ends. i suspect this might be the real problem behind your question,

Is there anyway to tell perl, "hey, you have already gone through x lines, don't start over at the beginning of the file when you loop back through?

by the way, always use strict and perl -w to keep your code on it's very best behaviour.

~Particle