Nice state machine. Your immediate problem is that you're pushing $_ onto @allow_edit when you really want to be pushing $value.

split works just like the docs say it does :-) Here's an example for you: my ($name,$value) = split /=/, $string;

Rather than slurping the entire file into an array and then copying part of that array to another array, I'd just use a while loop to read a line at a time and only create an array for the stuff you want in @allow_edit. There's nothing wrong with the way you did it, that's just what I would do.