I need to print the word in the file which has the maximum partial match to the inputted string.ie if the inputted string is fallen and the file has words fal,fall,falle,the value to be printed is falle.The code below gives errors

#!/usr/bin/perl-w 
use warnings;
use strict;

open my $fh1, '<', 'words'  or die $!;
my $a=$_;
while (my  $f1 = <$fh1> ) {
    chomp $f1;
    my $f2 = $a;
        chomp $f2;
if($f2=~m/$f1/i){print"$f1\n";}
}
[download]

The code below gives errors

Maybe you should figure out what they mean :/ use diagnostics

The line my$a=$_; does nothing useful, since $_ is uninitialised. As Anonymous Monk says, you need to read from STDIN. For example:

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;

print "Enter the target word: ";
chomp(my $target = <STDIN>);

my $in_file = 'words.txt';
open(my $in, '<', $in_file) or die "Cannot open file '$in_file' for re
+ading: $!";
my @matches;

while (<$in>)
{
    chomp;
    push @matches, $_ if $target =~ /$_/i;
}

close $in                   or die "Cannot close file '$in_file': $!";

@matches = sort { length $a <=> length $b } @matches;
print "The closest match is:  ", $matches[-1], "\n";
[download]

If the file “words.txt” contains:

fal
falle
fall
[download]

then, when “fallen” is entered from the keyboard, the output of the above script is:

 2:31 >perl 454_SoPW.pl
Enter the target word: fallen
The closest match is:  falle

 2:31 >
[download]

Hope that helps,

Update: Fixed error in sort: changed > to <=>. Also changed the order of words in the input file.

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum

Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

The code produces an error "Use of uninitialized value in print" when a word awiSayanA is compared with 2 words
awiSayaM
awiSayanZ
present in dictionary.Output is not produced.