Need an explanation

[Binish A R]

I've a file, which has entries like the following ... IDENTIFIER1=value1; IDENTIFIER2=value2; IDENTIFIER3=value3; etc I've got to parse the above file and am using a hash to do the same ... Here is my code ... while (<>) { chomp; next if /^#/; next if /^$/; %CONF = split /=/; } But %CONF contains only the last key/value pair :-/ So I had to modify the above script to while (<>) { chomp; next if /^#/; next if /^$/; $ref = [ split /=/ ]; $CONF{$ref->[0]} = $ref->[1]; } The above is working fine. So my question is why isn't the first code working? I don't want to use too many variables in my script, even with my second script I needed an extra variable viz $ref. Is it possible to get the job done using the first script? -- /binish/