It's possible, of course, but whenever you're thinking of creating a gazillion separate variables dynamically, you're usually better off using an array or hash. I'm not sure exactly what you want to do, but are you thinking of something like this?

foreach my $item (@data) {
    push @data_split, [split /\t/, $item];
}
[download]

Then you will have an array of arrayrefs that contain each line's data split on tabs. And @data is kept intact for you.

-- Mike

--
just,my${.02}