Thankyou Dave for correcting me. Appreciate it.

I tried out and your structure after decoding looks like this:

$VAR1 = {
          'eNewConnec' => 0,
          'peakConnec' => 0,
          'eCompressed' => 15164826,
          'iUncompressed' => 639536,
          'bytesSeries' => [
                             [
                               '1390795661000',
                               1179,
                               4940,
                               1016,
                               3428
                             ],
                            
                                  [
                                    '1390792141000',
                                    0,
                                    0
                                  ],
                                  [
                                    '1390792121000',
                                    0,
                                    0
                                  ],
                                  [
                                    '1390792101000',
                                    0,
                                    0
                                  ],
                                  [
                                    '1390792081000',
                                    0,
                                    0
                                  ]
                                ],
          'earliestTime' => '1390792081000',
          'eClosedConn' => 0,
          'latestTime' => '1390795661000',
          'iNewConn' => 0,
          'eUncompressed' => 23533344,
          'iCompressed' => 228561
        };
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My data is incremental so the same content with different values get appended to __DATA__ over time. I need to grep all occurances of say earliestTime from this structure and get its value in a variable.