I would recommend against naming variables based on dynamic input; that can get you into all sorts of troubles. A better idea (besides using DB files or an RDBMS, of course) would be to have a hash whose values are anonymous array references containing the data you need. As for separating the file data, you need to split the line on spaces. As far as I understand the question, I think this will work for you:

use strict;

my %users;
open USERS, "<users.txt";
while (<USERS>) {                          
  chomp;
  my @line = split / /;     
  $users{shift @line} = \@line;
}
close USERS;
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To get back at the data, you need to dereference the array, i.e. @{$users{$name}}. For example, to get a dump of the users,print join ' ', ($_, map($_, @{$users{$_}}), "\n") for (keys %users);Of course, you'd be better off using a DB file if you can; flat files require you to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways. Provided tied hashes properly handle array references (which I'm not sure of; I stick to RDBMSs), this should extend to that pretty easily.