You can avoid using a hash if you loop through @listnelements at a time, which has the added bonus of flexibility (for when you want to change the number of columns later on).

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

use strict;

my $columns = 2; # change this as needed
my @list    = sort qw(stereo tv monitor scanner keyboard mouse banana)
+;

while ( my @column = splice( @list, 0, $columns ) ) {

    printf "- %-20s", $_ foreach @column;
    print "\n";

  # print TR( td( \@column ) ), "\n"; # CGI.pm-ized :-)

}
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    --k.