in reply to push problem

You forgot the comma:

push @array, [$first, $last, $address, $city, $zip];

By the way, from looking at your printing loop, [] might not do what you expect it to. [] creates an anyonomous array (see perlref), and it won't print anything useful in your loop. To see what I mean, try:

while(<DATA>) { push @array, [$first, $last, $address, $city, $zip]; } foreach (@array){ print "@$_\n"; }

You mean have wanted the following, which pushes the elements onto the array linearly:

push @array, $first, $last, $address, $city, $zip;