Whenever Perl tells you that two strings are not equal, odds are that Perl is propably right.

As you don't show any data, I can only guess: You have a list of names in @ops, and you read in another name, put it into the variable $who, and now try to check whether $who is a member of @ops. Then, it is likely that whitespace in one of the fields is tripping you.

Make sure you print your data before and after, and look out for whitespace:

foreach $member (@ops) {
    print "Comparing member '$member' against '$who'\n";
    if ($member eq $who) {
        $op = 1;
        last;
    };
};
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Coincidentially, you might later on move to a more perlish construct:

$op = grep { $_ eq $who } @ops ? 1 : 0;
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