The lines that have 'hardware ethernet' on them are causing my big script to misinterpret the information.

A more elegant solution might be to fix the "big script" not to care about the order the lines come in. Here is one example that parses the config file and returns hash references of all the data.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

sub parse_host_cfg
{
    my ($file) = @_;

    my %fields;

    HOST_CFG_LOOP:
    while ( my $line = <$file> ) {
        chomp $line;
        last HOST_CFG_LOOP if ( $line =~ /\A\s*}/ );

        if ( my ($name, $value) = $line =~ /^([-\w\s]+) "?(.*?)"?;/ ) 
+{
            $fields{$name} = $value;
        }
        else {
            warn "invalid host config line: $line";
        }
    }

    return \%fields;
}

sub parse_cfg_file
{
    my %hosts;
    my ($file) = @_;

    while ( my $line = <$file> ) {
        chomp $line;
        if ( my ($hostid) = $line =~ /^host\s+(\w+)\s+{/ ) {
            my $host_cfg = parse_host_cfg( $file );
            $hosts{$hostid} = $host_cfg;
        }
    }

    return \%hosts;
}

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper parse_cfg_file( *DATA );

__DATA__
# Host 1
host 45583 {
filename "junk1.cm";
hardware ethernet 11:42:a3:d4:55:83;
fixed-address 10.100.34.114;
}
# Host 2
host D78C3 {
filename "junk5.cm";
fixed-address 10.100.34.117;
hardware ethernet 11:42:a3:FD:78:C3;
aklsjdhflkajsdfhlkjh
}
}
# Host 3
host 3A684 {
filename "junk6.cm";
fixed-address 10.100.34.119;
hardware ethernet 11:42:a3:13:a6:84;
}
# Host 4
host 46d54 {
filename "junk4.cm";
fixed-address 10.100.34.120;
hardware ethernet 23:10:3d:14:6d:54;
}
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