Hello sstruthe,

I think you’re looking for something like this:

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump;

my %dedicated;

while (my $line = <DATA>)
{
    chomp $line;

    my ($key, $values) = split ' ', $line;

    push @{ $dedicated{$key} }, $_ for split ',', $values;
}

dd \%dedicated;

__DATA__
names1 john,bob,stu
names2 mike,john,bob
names3 blah
[download]

Output:

22:16 >perl 1478_SoPW.pl
{
  names1 => ["john", "bob", "stu"],
  names2 => ["mike", "john", "bob"],
  names3 => ["blah"],
}

22:17 >
[download]

Hope that helps,