#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my %seen; while () { chomp; my ($acct, $data) = $_ =~ m{^(\d\d)(.*)}; next if $seen{$acct}{$data}++; append_data($acct, $_); } # If you know you are not going to exceed the open filehandle limit # You can improve performance by caching filehandles sub append_data { my ($acct, $line) = @_; open(my $fh, '>>', "$acct.txt") or die "Unable to open '$acct.txt' for appending: $!\n"; print $fh $line; }