Agreed, but the original post asked for either the first or the second; so I assumed that was all he wanted... In fact, if you don't want to use the list assignment you could do it also like this:

 my $first = ( split /::/, $readline, 2 )[ 0 ];
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Many, many ways of doing the same... And how I love it ;-)

-- JaWi

"A chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs."