Cheers,
Ovid

Update: Yeah! What he said!

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The URL is Why it's stupid to `use a variable as a variable name'.

Anyone who has not read this link should.

Parts 2 and 3 are one of the best statements I have ever read for why good programming style really is good programming style.

Actually, that does work:

bash-2.03$ perl -e'$foo = "bar"; $$foo = 1; print "$bar\n"'
1
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But like so many things which work, you don't want to do it like that. You are using something called symbolic references, which although allowed by perl are dangerous if you ever let a user get near @array. For instance, they could alter the value of any other variable in your program (like $path_to_utility).

You can do something simillar using hashes:

foreach (@array) {
  my ($key, $val) = split(/=/, $_);
  $vars{$key} = $val;
}
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Or, if you are actually using var1, var2 etc in your program, you might just want to use an array:

foreach (@array) {
  next unless /var(\d+)=(.*)/;
  $values[$1] = $2;
}
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You are missing the point that it is a really, really bad idea to do this for reasons explained by everyone else. Use a hash instead:

foreach my $var (@array) {
  my @val = split /=/, $var, 2;
  $hash{$val[0]} = $val[1];
}
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UPDATE
I must have accidentally hit the wrong reply. This was meant as a reply to spaz above.

If i was doing this from scratch I would go with the hash but i was being lazy and didn't want to modify the original code too much.

And thanks for the reference to a dissertation on perl stupidity, there must be many of us out there to require a 3 part article!

And finally I do very much appreciate this forum and your quick responses, I left the question on my way out from work and upon my return in the morning 3 responses. I couldn't pay for better support.

#!/usr/bin/perl

@array = ('var1=x','var2=y','var3=z');

foreach ( @array ) {
    s/^([^=]+?)=(.+?)$/\$$1 = "$2"/;
    eval;
    print "$_\n";
}

print "$var1 $var2 $var3\n";
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