You need to escape the '.' in your split: 
$base = ( split(/\./,$fname) )[0];

[download]
Adding -Mstrict and -w (always a good idea), the following works fine for me: 
perl -Mstrict -w -e '
  my $fname = "test.txt";
  my $base  = ( split(/\./,$fname) )[0];
  print "$base\n";'

[download]
Update: And, as others have mentioned, you have single quotes inside single quotes, too :)

Hope that helps ..

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In reply to Re: Getting a base name by Tanalis
in thread Getting a base name by Anonymous Monk

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