I guess you didn't post the complete program in here: 
@results = grep( /^$line[3]/, @raw_data);

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Where is the @line array coming from in this code?

Anyway, if the data file contains lines like: 

1235 some text data
784783 some other data

[download]
You can do something like: 
my $search_for = "text";
my $re = qr/^(\d+)\s+\Q$search_for\E/;
open D,"data.txt" or die "Cant open file: $!";
while (<D>) {
   /$re/ or next;
   print "$1\n";
}
close D;

[download]
to print all the numbers that correspond to the text "text". (and will not print records that have a number that happens to match your search query).

See also perlop and perlre. 

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.

[download]

In reply to Re: Problem with (recursively?) searching flat file database by Joost
in thread Problem with (recursively?) searching flat file database by nasa

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