There are a couple of tricks that you can use to make this a fairly simple problem. First is you can set the special variable $/ to '=================' to read a block at a time:

open my $inFile, '<', $filename or die "Failed to open $filename: $!\n
+";

local $/ = '=================';

while (defined (my $record = <$inFile>)) {
    chomp $record;
    ...
}
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You can then split the record using "\n" to get a list of lines:

my @lines = split "\n", $record;
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