my @all   = <FILE>; 
my @some = grep { !/^\s*$/ } (my @most = map { s/#.*$//; $_ } @all);
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Beware... that last map alters @all. It's very misleading.

If you're going to "copy and change", a nice idiom (which I've talked about here in the past) is:

s/#.*$// for my @most = @all;
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Although this isn't actually correct in the context of the original question. Just posting a better way to do what you ended up accidentally doing.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker