I'm a bit confused by the if (1..10) statement, but I think I see what you're trying to do, put the newest log entry at the top of the text file, and limit the text file to 10 lines, correct? this will do the trick ( i was lazy and didn't flock, and the code naievely assumes $logfile exists already, but you get the idea. ) it just uses an array slice in the last foreach loop to limit the number of lines.

peace.

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

my $log_string = "warning2 . . .";
my $logfile = "log.txt";
my @entries = ();
my $entry;

open LOG, "< $logfile" or die "cannot read $logfile";
@entries = <LOG>;
map { chomp } @entries, $log_string;
unshift @entries, $log_string;
close LOG;

open OUT, "> $logfile" or die "cannot write to $logfile";
foreach $entry ( @entries[0..9] ) {
print OUT $entry."\n";
}

close OUT;
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