It depends a bit on the data. Can the hashes contain any other nested data structures, or is it really just an array of plain hashes, where the only values are strings? If you could say with absolute certainty that the keys and values will never contain a certain string, such as "\0", in that case you could use that as a string to join the key/value pairs of the hashes for a string comparison. Another option might be to stringify the hashes with Data::Dumper (a core module) and compare those strings ($Data::Dumper::Sortkeys needs to be on), although I personally don't think that's a very clean solution. Another (untested) idea might be to serialize the hashrefs with Storable for a more compact representation than what Data::Dumper produces (Fletch's JSON solution and tybalt89's Data::Dump solution are the same kind of idea). And if you want to do it with absolutely no modules at all (which I wouldn't really recommend), then you'll have to code it up in Perl, looping over the hashes to compare them, stepping deeper into the data structure if necessary.

So please let us know of some more details of your data structure.