I want to see if I have repeated items in my array, there are over 16.000 so will automate it There may be other ways but I started with this and, well, would like to finish it unless there is a straightforward command. What I am doing is shifting and pushing from one array into another and this way, check the destination array to see if it is "in array" (like there is such a command in PHP). So, I got this sub routine and it works with literals, but it doesn't with variables. It is because of the 'eq' or whatever I should need. The 'sourcefile' will contain one or more of the words of the destination array. my @destination = ('hi', 'bye'); sub in_array { my ($destination,$search_for) = @_; return grep {$search_for eq $_} @$destination; } for($i = 0; $i <=100; $i ++) { $elemento = shift @sourcefile; if(in_array(\@destination, $elemento)) { print "it is"; } else { print "it aint there"; } } Well, if instead of including the $elemento in there I put a 'hi' it does work and also I have printed the value of $elemento which is also 'hi', but when I put the variable, it does not work, and that is because of the 'eq', but I don't know what else to put. If I put == it complains that 'hi' is not a numeric value.