Hi Lance, I don't know if this is too general for your purposes, but this should look through a whole file and find anyplace that the word "running" appear in three consecutive lines.
open (INFILE, "+<somefile.txt") or die "could not read file\n"; @all_lines = <INFILE>; for (0 .. ($#all_lines-2)){ if ( ($all_lines[$_] =~ m/running/gi) and ($all_lines[($_+1)] =~ m/running/gi) and ($all_lines[($_+2)] =~ m/running/gi) ) { Do some stuff... } } -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]