in reply to Data managing problem

Use hash and save each line with the second field as key of each record. So you will get the latest record if the key get duplicated.

use strict; use warnings; use Data::Dumper; use utf8; my %hash ; while(<DATA>) { my @arr = split(/\s+/, $_); $hash{$arr[1]}= $_; } print Dumper \%hash; __DATA__ 1/2/2013 cgoo nreuiheru 1/4/2013 doow reiqrqueih 1/5/2013 hellio ruieqrhfuepqh 1/20/2013 cgoo 3rhquh4ureyh 1/30/2013 yetil jerqohgqrij 2/13/2013 hellio rueqipheruh 2/14/2013 cgoo wehrig4r74378