sub addbuddy {

#add victim to buddy list
      #open names file 
    open (FILE, "names.txt");
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You should always check the value returned by open and take appropriate action. How do you know that the file has been opened successfully?

    $list = <FILE>;
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This takes the first line from FILE and assigns it to $list. That is probably not what you want to do.

    close(DATA);

    #checks each name 
    foreach $item (@list) {
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You don't have a variable called @list. If you were running your program with use strict turned on then Perl would have told you that.

    #remove lowercase and spaces from names
    $item =~ s/ //g;
    $item = lc ($item);
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That doesn't remove lowercase letters from the name. It coverts the name to all lowercase.

    }
     
     #check if name is in file
     if ($victim eq "$item") {
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There's no need to quote $item here.

     }
     else {

      #if it does not exits add it
     open (DATA, ">names.txt");
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Once again, you don't check the return code from open. Also you open the file for writing (which removes all of the data in the file) when you probably want to append the data to the end of the file.

     print DATA "$victim\n";
     Close (DATA);
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Perl is case sensitive. That should be close.

     }
      #Notify the terminal
     print "A Buddy name was added..";
}
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Hope that helps.

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

1. use strict all the time
2. always test with -w

use strict; # do this all the time

addbuddy("Peter1"); # the more test cases, the better
addbuddy("Peter2");
addbuddy("Peter1");
addbuddy("Peter3");
addbuddy("peTer 1");

sub addbuddy {
    my $victim = shift;
    $victim =~ s/ //g; # transform victim in the same way you transfor
+m the list, otherwise you may run into trouble without your notice
    $victim = lc($victim);

    open(FILE, "<", "names.txt"); # I don't want use +< to confuse you
+, even though it is better for this case
    my @list = <FILE>; #read in the whole list
    close(FILE);

    foreach my $item (@list) {
        chomp($item); #get rid of line breaks
        $item =~ s/ //g;
        $item = lc($item);
    }

    my %list = map {$_, 1} @list; # the only thing looks tricky in my 
+code
    if (!defined($list{$victim})) {
        open (DATA, ">>names.txt");# you don't want to use >, and over
+write your file.
         print DATA "$victim\n";
         close (DATA);
        print "Buddy $victim was added\n";# always make the debug msg 
+meaningful
    }
}
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thanks to you all. but it adds the $victim like this to the file net::aim=hash(0x194efc4) instead of botroktester but it will send replies to that name so it is working just want to know why and if that could be changed?

That's a problem with whatever you're passing into the subroutine. Your subroutine seems to be expecting a string that contains a name, but you're actually passing in a Net::Aim object.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

There are a couple of problems which don't seem to directly relate to your question, but which might be the cause of the difficulty.

The way you describe it, you seem to be using a bunch of independent standalone scripts which may be subject to scoping problems with variables.

The code you show has problems with the scope of $victim, an inappropriate comparison in line 019, demolishment of the names.txt file in line 024, an undefined function 'Close', and no result checking in any system interaction.

A single open with:

{
    open my $foo, '+<', $filename or die $!;
    /$victim/ and last while <$foo>;
    print $foo $victim, $/  or die $!;
}
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After Compline,
Zaxo