Beware of grep in scalar context. You need to use parentheses to create list context.

Nowadays, i.e. with Perl 5.10, you don't have to specify how to match in the grep. Using the ~~ operator you can let $SearchStr handle that.

my $SearchStr = 'foo.txt';
#my $SearchStr = qr/^foo_.*\.txt\z/i;
#my $SearchStr = [ 'foo.txt', 'bar.txt' ];

my ($grepresult) = grep { $_->[0] ~~ $SearchStr } @cdata;
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lodin