1. You're using split in scalar context, when you really mean to receive a list from it.

2. Your .* might be matching greedily. Perhaps .*? would be better in this situation.

3. You are telling split to split on a bunch of anything (except newlines) followed by an open parenthesis. Since .* is greedy, it's matching everything from the beginning of the line to the last left paranth. Split slurps up (and throws away) the delimeters (in this case, everything preceeding and including the last open parenthesis). Even if .* wasn't greedy, your definition might be causing -aterm( to become the first delimeter, and 2559,ddicks)---screen( to become the next delimeter, leaving nothing behind to return as the list of things between delimeters.

4. You are using eq. Eq isn't an assignment operator, it's a comparative operator. You need to be using = instead.

You should probably use a method involving regexp matches with capturing rather than split. And make sure to beware of greedy .*. But of course there is more than one way to do it. ;)

Dave

"If I had my life to do over again, I'd be a plumber." -- Albert Einstein