Interesting, I was also thinking of yesterday's "splice/mesh" discussion. (I wouldn't really do it this way.)

But do notice in your RE, I changed delimiter and did not escape forward slashes, commas or hyphens. 

use strict;
use warnings;
use List::MoreUtils qw(mesh);
use Data::Dumper;

my @users;
my @fields = qw(login uid gid name home shell);
while (<DATA>) {
    m#^\s*([\w-]+):x:(\d+):(\d+):([\w\s\(\),-]*):([\w/]+):([\w/]*)$#
      or die "Malformed input [$_]";
    push @users, { mesh @fields, @{[//]} };
}

print Dumper \@users;
__DATA__
root:x:0:0::/:/usr/bin/ksh
paul:x:201:1::/home/paul:/usr/bin/ksh
jdoe:x:202:1:John Doe:/home/jdoe:/usr/bin/ksh

[download]

Update: The parens don't need to be escaped either: 

    m#^\s*([\w-]+):x:(\d+):(\d+):([\w\s(),-]*):([\w/]+):([\w/]*)$#

[download]

In reply to Re: Getting rid of a temporary variable in AoH by hbm
in thread Getting rid of a temporary variable in AoH by reisinge

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