Where you are reading the data (the while ! eof section is probably where you want to do this. Instead of the print command, you would load it into a buffer for processing it into a hash.

The way that you are reading the text from $bigcmd will not give you data in any structured form, but just as a string of at most 1024 characters at a time. You will probably want to join the strings together, split them into the actual records (or use regular expressions), and then push them into a data structure.

One thing that may help get some more help on this is to list a small snippet of what the output looks like, as well as how the resulting output string should look.

Update: As zentara has also stated, if you are just looking to have a set of lines, and not structured data, reading the data into an array is likely a better option.

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