I'm just learning Perl (I felt the lure of the dark side after starting with Python :P). Anyways, I'm having a problem with the following short script. I believe the problem is because the value of an associative array must be a scalar (right?), but I want to store a list. Here's the script: -- 
my %user_dict;     #stores {user : info} of all system users
my @user_info;     #temp list of data from USER_LIST
my @online_list;   #list of users currently logged in
my $user;
my $online;
my $user_online;

open (USER_LIST, 'users') or open(USER_LIST, '/etc/passwd')
    or die "Couldn't open: $!";
while (<USER_LIST>) {
  @user_info = split /:/, $_;
  $user_dict{$user_info[0]} = \@user_info[4,5];
}

@online_list = split(' ', `/usr/bin/users`);
foreach $user (keys %user_dict) {
  $online = 0;
  foreach $user_online (@online_list) {
    if ($user_online eq $user) {
      $online = 1;
      last;
    }
  }
  if ($online) {
    print "Online text box\n";
  } else {
    print "Offline text box\n";
  }
  print "User Info on $user: $user_dict{$user}\n";
}
--

[download]
Instead of printing the 5th and 6th
fields of /etc/passwd (homedir + shell), 
it prints "User Info on root: SCALAR(0x8056d08)".

Could someone:
1) Tell me what I'm doing wrong
2) PLEASE comment on *how* I've coded this.
I want to learn to code Perl write, and shed all the Python-esque techniques I've learned. If you were going to write the above, how would you do it? Should I be declaring all my variables at the top, or should I declare them throughout the program? TIA

In reply to newbie - hash - array? by Anonymous Monk

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