It seems the OP uses Win32, that's the reason I used \r\n :-) I'm sorry, but I'm on Mac OS X so I can't test the input.

The \n+ trick does the job, like the example below:

use Data::Dumper;

my $input = <<EOI
a = 1
b = 2
  
c = 3
  
d = 4
EOI
;

# clean empty lines
$input =~ s/^\s*$//mg;

# construct the dictionary from $input
my %dict = split m/\s+=\s+|\n+/, $input;

print Dumper \%dict;
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Output:

$ perl test.pl 
$VAR1 = {
          'c' => '3',
          'a' => '1',
          'b' => '2',
          'd' => '4'
        };
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Hope this helps!