That should be working, assuming I understand you correctly. Are you sure $_ has been set? What do you mean by "it won't let me"?

It would help us more if you would post your code. Be sure to use <code> and </code> tags when you do, and don't bother creating a new node. Just reply to the node you've posted here.

Skeletal code that should work:

open FILE, $filename or die "Can't open $filename: $!\n";
while (<FILE>) {
    my @data_in = split /\|/, $_;
    # process @data_in
}
[download]

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp $n = <STDIN>; $r
+ose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$other
+_name\n"'
[download]