AHA! Thanks, mreece (and others). That's what I'm looking for - and it's working now. From that suggestion, I've constructed the following snippet which is just a small portion of a much larger work: 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl5 -w
use Getopt::Std;
require "/path/datafile";
getopts('f:');
chomp $opt_f ;
if ( $opt_f ) {
        @combined =  eval "$opt_f" ;
}
foreach $entry ( @combined )
{
        print "$entry \n";
}

[download]
Thanks for your patience with a beginner. I read through the warnings about variables in array names before I posted the original post, so I was expecting a lot of people to jump onto that detail... thanks for taking the time to fully understand the problem.

In reply to Re^4: Array of Arrays with Variable Names by JWM
in thread Array of Arrays with Variable Names by JWM

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