If you're using 5.005 or earlier, you have to ask "Mother may I?". If you're using Perl 5.6 or later, you have to wait until you hear "Perl says..."

Seriously, we can only guess at what's going on when you say "won't let me". You'll need to post more code.

If I were you, I'd have something like:

open(INPUT, 'file.txt') or die "Can't open file.txt: $!";
while (<INPUT>) {
    chomp;
    my @data = split(/\|/, $_);
    # do something with @data
}

close INPUT;
[download]

Untested code, because I've done that at least twice before. :)

Please reply to this post (or another in this thread) with any information that can help to clarify.