The matchtext definition in $fline works like the matchtext definitions of on text events: you can use *wildcards*, use & to represent single words etc.
In addition, you coud process multiple matched lines if you specify the N of $fline(@window,matchtext,N) and while-loop every N match. It's even possible to $fline for a regular expression.
In short, you can do virtually everything you could do with $read in a @window directly.