I'm sorry I wasn't very explicit. Basically, these statements occur as part of an if statement and I am trying to determine if the strings "/home", "/mail", or "cat: cannot open /home/$username/$file" occur in the variable $columns[0]. If, for example, "/home" does occur in the variable as part of a string, I want to display the contents of the variable. If it does not occur, I want to display an error to the user. My problem is with the regular expression. In psudo-code, my statement would be something like: 
if (the string within $columns[0] contains the substring "/home")
{ 
  take an action
}

[download]
I know that PHP can search for substrings with a function, but I am not sure how to do this in perl and am wondering if there is a function to do this or if I must use regular expressions. Thanks for your input; I'll try to make my posts a bit more explicit.

updated 2003-06-24 by mirod: replaced [ and ] by [ and ] respectively.

In reply to Re: Re: Fiddling around with reg-ex by JoeJaz
in thread Fiddling around with reg-ex by JoeJaz

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