Sorry I should have clarified a bit more. Here is an example file I'm working with.

ASDF_ONE {
    magic
    tmp
    tmp
}
ASDF_TWO {
    tmp
    tmp
    tmp
}
string3 {
    tmp
    tmp
    magic
}
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Some sections have a common prefix, like ASDF_. I want a function in my program to scan a specific section for the magic word using an argument. The function returns true if word is found, else returns false. See code below for how I want to structure this:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $file = "/path/to/file.txt";

sub has_word {
    my $arg = $_[0];
    local $/;
    open FILE, '<', $file;

    while ( <FILE> ) {
        if ( m/(ASDF_$arg \{)(.*?)magic(.*?)(\})/s ) {
            close FILE;
            return 1;
        } else {
            close FILE;
            return 0;
        }
    }
}

sub main {
    if (has_word("ONE")) {
        print "ONE already has the word.\n";
    } else {
        print "ONE does not have the word.\n";
    }
    if (has_word("TWO")) {
        print "TWO already has the word.\n";
    } else {
        print "TWO does not have the word.\n";
    }
}

main;
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The output I get is:

ONE already has the word.
TWO already has the word.
[download]

I think this .*? is searching for any character including the closing brace }.

> s .*? is searching for any character including the closing brace }.

Yes, that's why I added an alternative.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

Thanks I think I got the right regex now, this seems to work

m/(ASDF_$arg \{)([^}]*?)magic(.*?)(\})/s

That is exactly what I wanted.