I've just been doing something similar with a script that I was working on. Here's how I handled it:

First, I read the data file's name into @ARGV. Next, I used the diamond operator (<>) in a while to read each line's data into an array using push. Then, I used split to separate fields within each element from each other using a delimiter in the field (in my case, it was a colon rather than a comma that acted as the delimiter).

If you need only the names, or only the ages, you can always just set a hash equal to the array, then use the keys and values (functions) to separate them out.

I'm sure there are better ways to do this, but I'm not the world's most savvy Perl hacker. In any case, this methodology works.

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