As for chomping the line... he said he wanted the line. He didn't say anything about the newline, so I didn't assume anything about the newline.

As for the unnecessary ||= []: yes, I know that's unnecessary, but I do it anyways, always. It's just personal style. In anything other than a one-liner (where economy of characters is important) I avoid the implicit autovivification of undef into anonymous references, just because (I believe) it's clearer to someone reading the code if you are explicit. They don't have to wonder if that autovivification was an accident or not.

Finally, for the splitting... (again personal style), I find the 3-arg form of split to be ugly. Split and join are very pure and beautiful functional notions (string <=> list), and unless there's a compelling reason to mess with split's default behavior, I don't. Again, taking the unwanted stuff in and explicitly discarding it is also for readability and clarity of intent. If anything, looking at it now, I should have said my ($key, @rest) = split; to be clear that it was a list of arbitrary length and I was only interested in the first item.

Anyway, no need to get into an argument over style. I just wanted to make clear that I didn't do that because I failed to understand... it was merely how I like to do it. ++ to you for your attention to detail, though.

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