Beware of grep in scalar context. You need to use parentheses to create list context.

Nowadays, i.e. with Perl 5.10, you don't have to specify how to match in the grep. Using the ~~ operator you can let $SearchStr handle that.

my $SearchStr = 'foo.txt';
#my $SearchStr = qr/^foo_.*\.txt\z/i;
#my $SearchStr = [ 'foo.txt', 'bar.txt' ];

my ($grepresult) = grep { $_->[0] ~~ $SearchStr } @cdata;
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lodin

but then your dot would match any character

You could do \Q...\E to quote the metacharacter.

my ( $grepresult ) = grep { $_->[0] =~ m{\Q$SearchStr\E} } @cdata;
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Cheers,

JohnGG

Update: I also missed the scalar/list problem, parentheses added. lodin ++