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in reply to Search and delete lines based on string matching

In addition to davorg's advice above you should also always use both strict and warnings, as they can help you identify many common problems.

If you are searching for the words from file A in file B then you will need a different regex. The code you provided is using the entire file A as the regex.

Here's an example that uses one pattern file, one input file, one output file:

use strict; use warnings; if (@ARGV != 3) { print "Usage: $0 <pattern file> <input file> <output file>\n"; exit; } my ($pattern_filename, $source_filename, $dest_filename) = @ARGV; open my $pattern_fh, '<', $pattern_filename or die "Failed to open $pa +ttern_filename: $!"; my @tokens = (); while (my $line = <$pattern_fh>) { push @tokens, split /\s/, $line; } # Create a pattern with alternation of tokens, wrapped in a non-captur +ing group, # and a requires word break before and after the word to prevent match +ing pieces # of other words my $pattern = '\b(?:' . join('|', @tokens) . ')\b'; print "Search pattern: $pattern\n"; open my $infile, "<", $source_filename or die "Failed to open $source +_filename: $!"; open my $outfile,">>", $dest_filename or die "Failed to open $dest_f +ilename: $!"; while(my $line = <$infile>) { if ($line !~/$pattern/) { print "adding: $line"; print $outfile $line; } } close($infile); close($outfile);