A friend of mine gave me an idea.. One which I've been have a bit of trouble implementing. Here's the scoop:

use File::Slurp;

if ($msg =~ /(.*)\+\+/) {

              my $user = $1;

              my $karma_file = "karma.txt";

              my $results = grep (/^$user/, $karma_file);
              print "$results\n";

              if ($results == 0) {

                append_file ($karma_file, "$user 1\n");
                print "$user now exists\n";
              }

              else {

                my @lines = split m[$/], read_file ($karma_file);

                foreach my $line (@lines) {
                  my ($user, $karma) = split /\s/, $line;

                  $karma++;
                  my @without_user = grep (!/^$user/, $results);
                  overwrite_file ($karma_file, @without_user);
                  append_file ($karma_file, "$user $karma\n");

                  print "$user now has $karma karma\n";
                  undef $user;
                }
            }
         }
      }
  );
}
[download]

As you can probably tell, I'm trying to keep a tally on a users 'xp', denoted by the amount of times they were ++'d. My intent is to check a file for the presence of a user, if the user doesn't exist, create it, and append an 'xp' of 0, and if it does exist, grab the users 'xp', increment it, store it, then grab the data from the file excluding that user, overwrite the file, and write the line back to the file with the users new 'xp'.
Sound confusing?

Any suggestions are welcome :)