As
ikegami said above, you need to use
$i not
$i-1 in the
substr. Running the data you listed on my machine resulted in all being chopped (probably because of the lack of spaces before the "=")
I would suggest, however, using
split instead of
index and
substr. It's simpler and cleaner with no messy index residue!
my ( $conf, $val ) = split /=/, $line, 2;