Why do you have a random "%groupinfo"? That line should end with a semi-colon and start with a "my" keyword. my %groupinfo;

Secondly the only place you mention desc is in the body of the while loop, and it's a scalar. Why are you trying to print out a hash named desc later on?

 $desc = "foo"; Does not affect anything named %desc.

Where do you get the variable $line from? You don't declare it. You don't assign anything to it. You just made it up and hoped it worked?

Heres a rewrite that sucks slightly less:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; # or die

my %groupinfo;

open(IN, "groupinfo") or die "Can't open groupinfo: $!";
while( my $line = <IN> )
{
  my( $name, $desc ) = split/:/,$line;
  $groupinfo{$name} = $desc;
}

print %groupinfo;
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