perl question

[Cliff]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't just an equality match work for
you?
Something along the lines of:

if ($input eq "linux")
{
    # do something here
}

Or am I missing something?

If you were parsing a file you could just extend this a bit:
open (FILE,$filename);
while(<FILE>)    # this would assume that you have just a simple list of
words
    {
    if ($_ eq "linux")
        {
        # do something
        }
    }

Cliff