There's a discussion of this approach in perlfaq6: "How can I pull out lines between two patterns that are themselves on different lines?" — even a one-liner! See also the discussion of the scalar context  .. flip-flop operator in Range Operators (scalar context sub-section) in perlop (some examples of what you want there also). (Update: See also Flipin good, or a total flop?, also with code that's almost exactly what theleftright seems to want.)