Update: Pardon my well-intentioned mistake. See comments below.

Hey

I tried to stick close to your structure, and I did this a little unconventionally to avoid the multi-line match. I'm sure that someone else will tell you (correctly) that this is more cleanly done with such a match, but I think it's easier to mimic your structure this way, and that helps to see what's going on.

use warnings;
open(CITY, "city.cpp.txt") || die("sorry, file couldn't be opened. $!"
+);
while ($content=<CITY>) {
    if ($content!~m#//|/\*#) {
        print "$content";
    } elsif ($content=~m#/\*#) {
        while (<CITY>!~m#\*/#) {
        }
    }
}
[download]

This program works by printing lines that don't have comment bars and aren't the beginning of multiline comments. If a line is the beginning of a multiline comment, it does a while loop that doesn't do anything except skip through lines until it finds the end of the comment. Now when the filehandle is passed back to your initial while loop, the next line is the one after the multiline comment.

Let me know if you need more help figuring out how this works.

Hays