I'm not sure as I didn't write all this code. Most of it is taken from a Xymon sample.

Here is the peice of code that builds the Hash,

while ($line = <STDIN>) {
        if ($line =~ /^\@\@client\#/) {
                # It's the start of a new client message - the header 
+looks like this:
                # @@client#830759/HOSTNAME|1169985951.340108|10.60.65.
+152|HOSTNAME|sunos|sunos

                # Grab the hostname field from the header
                @hdrfields = split(/\|/, $line);
                $hostname = $hdrfields[3];

                # Clear the variables we use to store the message in
                $msgtxt = "";
                %sections = ();
        }
        elsif ($line =~ /^\@\@/) {
                # End of a message. Do something with it.
                processmessage();
        }
        elsif ($line =~ /^\[(.+)\]/) {
                # Start of new message section.

                $cursection = $1;
                $sections{ $cursection } = "\n";
        }
        else {
                # Add another line to the entire message text variable
+,
                # and the the current section.
                $msgtxt = $msgtxt . $line;
                $sections{ $cursection } = $sections{ $cursection } . 
+$line;
        }
}
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Use Data::Dumper, try

warn Dumper \%sections;
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before matching the regexp. With your sample data contained as string in the hash, everything should work.

I've added warn Dumper \%sections; into my script and it still doesn't work. Any further ideas?