I am such a newly hatched user of Perl, I still have eggshells on my pants. This is my first question for perlmonks, and I hope I can find an easy answer.
I've been writing shell scripts and can get around there pretty well. I am trying to rewrite some of the shell scripts into Perl so I can use them both on Unix and Windows.
Working with multiple environments with multiple databases, I have a set of files that tells me stuff about the environment and the databases within the environment. An example: Environment is FOO. FOO has a number of databases. I have a text file called FOO.dbs to tell me about the databases in FOO. Each line of the FOO.dbs file is a pipe-delimited string that tells me the dbname, the host it runs on, the directory the db is on, the directory to do dump&load to, etc. An example of a line in the FOO.dbs would be:
bar|development|/usr/bar/db|/dbdump

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Inside a script (shell script or perl) I read each line and pass the line to another script that parses the line and sets up variables for me to use. The subscript (parse-dbinfo) in Unix uses the 'cut' command to return the fields like this:
DB=`echo $1        | cut -f 1 -d "|"`
HOST=`echo $1      | cut -f 2 -d "|"`
DBDIR=`echo $1     | cut -f 3 -d "|"`
DUMPDIR=`echo $1   | cut -f 4 -d "|"`

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With this information, my shell script can work with the variables to get work done. I can refer to a specific database by '$DBDIR/$DB' to get '/usr/bar/db/bar'.
How can I duplicate the effect of the 'cut' to load the variables in PERL?

In reply to Parse a pipe-delimited list by jhs3

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