Leo, what atcroft was pointing out is that you need to put your code like this:

cat status.dat | \
perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -MData::Dumper -lne '
use vars qw(%s); 
BEGIN{ 
  $Data::Dumper::Deepcopy 
    = $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys 
    = 1; 
}; 
chomp; 
if ( m/\}/ ) { 
  print Data::Dumper->Dump( [ \%s, ], [ qw( *s ) ] ); 
  %s = (); 
} 
next if ( m/^\s*$/imsx ); 
$s{TYPE} = $1 if ( m/^\s*(\S+)\s*\{/imsx ); 
$s{$1} = $2 if ( m/^\s+([^=]+)=(.+)$/imsx ); 
'
[download]