Sounds like you want 'awkish' behaviour with an ASCII table. This kind of thing is covered in fair detail in perldsc, and for your case, perllol. Briefly, though, straight from the docs, while (<>) { push @list_of_lists, [ split ]; } is generally, I trust, what you have in mind. If you're going to be using references to construct data structures of this sort, I strongly recommend the above manpages. On Mon, 14 Sep 1998, george wrote: > i would like to "slurp" a file directly into a 2 dimensional array. > what is the fastest method of doing this? ***** Want to unsubscribe from this list? ***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch