Although you have a couple ways described here I decided to munge it myself. (After all it's perl and theres always more than one way! )

This code uses an array of Hashes to represent the records. and the Lefthand identifier ( From: Date: etc ) is dynamically used for the hash keys. This is IMHO more flexable. Heres the code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl 

use strict ;   
use warnings ;
use Data::Dumper ; 

my @records ;
my $count = 0 ;
while (<DATA>)
{
    next if ( /^\n/ ) ; # skip newlines
    if (/^--/)  # new record
    {
        $count++ ;   
        next ;
    }

    my ( $field, @words ) = split ;  # get the 2 needed fields
    $field =~ s/://g ;                          # drop the ":"
    my $data = join " ", @words ;  # make a string
    chomp $data ;                            #  remove the newline
    
    $records[$count]{$field} = $data ;
}

print Dumper(\@records); # easy way to unfold the structure 

__DATA__
From: pminich@foo.com
To: esquared@foofoo.com
File: value.scr
Action: The uncleanable file is deleted.
Virus: WORM_KLEZ.H
----------------------------------
Date: 06/30/2002 00:01:21
From: mef@mememe.com
To: inet@microsoft.com
File: Nr.pif
Action: The uncleanable file is deleted.
Virus: WORM_KLEZ.H
----------------------------------

[download]
you can now unfold the structure by looping through @records : 
foreach my $record (@records)
{
    # $record is now a ref to the Hash it contianed
    # print a field from the record
     print "\nNew Record\n" ;
     print "FROM: $$record{From}, \n" ;


    # or loop through each key for current record
    foreach my $key (sort keys %$record )
    {
        print "$key => $$record{$key} \n" ;
    }
}

[download]
Hope it helps !

In reply to Re: virus log parser by yodabjorn
in thread virus log parser by phaedo

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