Good suggestions, demerphq++. A small detail

my ($key, $value) = split(/s+/,$_); #i dont like naked splits.. personally...

It's OK to not like this bare split, but you should be aware that your version is behaving differently if $_ has leading whitespace, so to write it long and correctly, do this:

$_ = "  key    value";
my ($key, $value) = split(" ",$_);

# note: this behaves differently
my ($key, $value) = split(/ /,$_);
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Try it out and see the difference, this is documented in split as well.

-- Hofmator