It's just you all seem to be skipping over that part and saying "yes, but" whereas I'm not even at "yes".

Is it because in C you can't have an array that just gets bigger and bigger to handle all the data that you shove into it, it has to have a pre-declared size, something like that?

Okay. Here's a somewhat complete though simplistic implementation of the program written in C. It is more complete, in that it includes the code for prompting the user and retrieving the input, and makes some attempt at error checking (not enough), that was completely absent from the perl version above. It also cheats by using a linear search rather than hashing the lookup.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys\stat.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include<io.h>

#define  FILE    "data"
#define     LINESIZE 80

int main( ) {
    struct stat statbuf;
    char *linebuf, *p, *found;
    int fh, price;

    if( ! stat( FILE, &statbuf )
    &&  ( p = calloc( statbuf.st_size, sizeof( char ) ) )
    &&  ( fh = open( FILE, O_RDONLY|O_BINARY, S_IREAD ) )
    &&  ( read( fh, p, statbuf.st_size ) > 0 )
    &&  ! close( fh )
    ) {
        printf( "%s", "Fruit? " );
        linebuf = calloc( LINESIZE, sizeof( char ) );
        fgets( linebuf, LINESIZE, stdin );
        *( linebuf + strlen( linebuf ) -1 ) = 0;
        if( (found = strstr( p, linebuf )) ) {
            sscanf( found + strlen( linebuf ), "%i", &price );
            printf( "%s costs %d", linebuf, price );
        } else {
            printf( "No price for %s available\n", linebuf );
        }
        free( p ); free( linebuf );
    } else {
        printf( "Error: %d", errno );
    }
    return (0);
}
[download]

This is about as simple as it is possible to do write something roughly equivalent in C, whereas I've no doubt that this coudl be done as a perl one-liner with a little effort.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
Hooray!