If your data is relatively small-ish, you could slurp everything into an array and rely on indices. Assuming that the -- will always appear 2 lines down, you could do something like:

my @data = <IN>;
my $value = 0;

for (0..$#data) {

   if ($data[$_] =~ /ABC SET/ and $data[$_+2] =~ /^--/) {
      $value++;
   }
}
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Your suspicisions about Parse::RecDescent are correct, it would be useful here, but it also takes a long time to get it right. If a quick fix will get the job the done then take it and run, i would only investigate a P::RD solution if i needed to do something more complex with the data.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)