Thanks mkmcconn, but the users that are going to be adding things to the config file aren't going to know how/what/why to push information to the array since it is in the code that shouldn't need to be modified. Zaxo came up with a viable solution that I am going to use. I did realize that what I was trying to do was the equivalent of expecting to see "foo bar" as a result to:
my $var = print "foo bar";
print "$var\n"