This type of data-drive setup can drive a less-skilled maintenance programmer bonkers. I'm moderately skilled at Perl, and it took me several minutes, and most of the fingers on one hand, to puzzle out what you were trying to do.

Let me suggest an alternate approach. First get rid of the opendir calls by delegating to File::Find.

  use File::Find;

  find(\&eachfile, "/data/");
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and then structure the callback along the lines of

  sub eachfile {
      my $path = $File::Find::name;

      return if -d $path;

      $path =~ s|^.*/(.+)_logs/|| or return; # or log
      my $item = $1;

      if ( $path =~ m|(.+)\.(\d+)$| ) {
          my($company,$quantity) = ($1,$2);
          inventory($company, $item, $quantity);
          return;
      }

      # and so on for each remaining case

      # eventually logging any that you can't handle
  }
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That's the rough idea, at least -- it needs some cleanup and error handling.

This would seem to me to be a very easy thing for whoever comes along after you to understand and maintain. The most they would need to understand is File::Find, and that's a low hurdle.

Granted, this leaves you with the equivalent of a string if/elseif*/else, but it seems easy enough to follow.

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