Cirollo is right. and you want to be careful about where your hash is defined. if it's created inside the while loop, it will be regenerated after every match of the $userid. if it's created outside the while loop, you can add info to it and do your processing after the while loop ends. i suspect this might be the real problem behind your question,

Is there anyway to tell perl, "hey, you have already gone through x lines, don't start over at the beginning of the file when you loop back through?

by the way, always use strict and perl -w to keep your code on it's very best behaviour.

~Particle

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.