That was a typo and I have fxed it. I'm still not getting any idea abou7t how to do this, and how to break out the tail -f?

This is what I got so far:

#!/NMS/perl/ACTIVE/bin/perl -w

use warnings;
use strict;

#variables
my $currentDate = `date +%Y%m%d`;
my $logPath = "/logs";
my $logFile = "$logPath/log.$currentDate";
my $ipaddress = $ARGV[0];
my @tail = `tail -f $logFile | grep $ipaddress`;

#print "Log file: $logFile\n";
#print "IP address: $ipaddress\n";

# script begins
if (@tail) {
 my @lines = $tail[0 - 2];
 print @lines;
 exit(0);
} 
else {
  print "not found";
  exit(1);
}
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I think you will need to use the file handle with the while loop as the other posters have suggested. Have you tried this?