Looks to me like the old "taking a reference to the same array many times" problem. Because @temp is a package variable, you'll get the same reference each time and end up storing multiple copies of the last record. Is that what you're seeing?

Fixing it is easy. Either create a new @temp each time with my like this:

 
while (<PARMFILE>) {
  next if /^#/ || /^\s*$/;
  chomp;
  my @temp=split(/\s+/,$_);
  $dbparms{$temp[2]} = \@temp;
}
[download]

or copy the array each time:

 
while (<PARMFILE>) {
  next if /^#/ || /^\s*$/;
  chomp;
  @temp=split(/\s+/,$_);
  $dbparms{$temp[2]} = [@temp];
}
[download]

See perldoc perldsc for more description of this problem.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you don't talk about Perl club."