As crazyinsomniac points out you might want to become a bit more familiar with the Perl array and hash data structures. %varname denotes a hash, @varname an array. If you were generating a list of all users or performing some task(s) for more than one user, then using an array or hash would be appropriate. Why store all that data you're not even going to use?

However, if what you are trying to do is to perform some task if a user is in your authentication file, you probably don't need either structure. The following code illustrates this approach:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $searchfor = "somebody";
my ($login, $pass, $email, $some, $other, $stuff);
open PASSWD, "<passwd.ini";
while (<PASSWD>) {
   if ((split/\|/)[0] eq $searchfor) {
      chomp;
      ($login, $pass, $email, $some, $other, $stuff) = split /\|/;
      last;
   }
   print "nomatch: ", (split/\|/)[0], "\n";
}

if ($login) {
   # match was found. 'print' verifies we got the right stuff.
   print "match found: $login, $pass, $email, $some, $other, $stuff\n"
+;
   # do whatever else . . .
}
[download]

Contents of file: passwd.ini

nobody|nopass|nobody@home.com|some1|other1|stuff1
anybody|anypass|anybody@home.net|some2|other2|stuff2
somebody|somepass|somebody@home.org|some3|other3|stuff3
everybody|everypass|everybody@home.gov|some4|other4|stuff4
[download]

Resulting output:

nomatch: nobody
nomatch: anybody
match found: somebody, somepass, somebody@home.org, some3, other3, stu
+ff3
[download]

HTH,

--Jim

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