Don't go mucking around with special global vars w/o localizing them first (at least, not when giving advice to others)! Even if it doesn't make much of a difference in this small script, it is a bad habit to get into and *will* come back to bite in a longer program.

#!/bin/perl -w
use strict;
{
   local $/="|--------------------------------------|\n";
    while( <DATA>) {
      [SNIP]
   }
   [SNIP]
}

### Here in the program, the <FH> operator will now behave normally
### Before you could have been burned, since any other calls 
### to <FH> would see the specialized value of $/, even calls
### in subroutines.  As you can imagine, this is a pain to debug
### Its best to avoid this trap altogether as I have done above.
[download]

Update: Added parenthetical clarification....

-Blake