The first argument to split is (usually, and definitely in this case) a regular expression. The pipe symbol | is a metacharacter in regexes meaning 'or' - so you've told split to split off whenever it matches a null character or a null cahracter. This happens between every character.
I think what you wanted was:
($acc_num, $ofname,$junk,$olname,$junk2) = split /\|/, $line, 5;
where the backslash makes the pipe character match literally.
--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com
All code given here is UNTESTED unless otherwise stated.
