Ah. You were trying to create symbolic references. Don't do that.

Why not use a hash of hashes instead?

use strict;
use warnings;

my $ComDir='.\\';
my $Inputfile='ProxyFTP';
my $Outputfile='ftpreport.txt';
my $Permsfile='userperms.txt';

open(PERF, "<$ComDir$Permsfile") 
  || die ("died opening source file $Permsfile: $!");

my %data;
while (<PERF>) {
  chomp;
  my ($name, $val) = split / /, cleanupline($_), 2;
  $data{$name}{$val} = 1;
}

# next 3 lines should print Exists
my $nam='sapuser';
my $val='1.2.3.4';
print "Exists\n"         if exists $data{$nam}{$val};

# next 3 lines should not print Exists
$nam='sapuser';
$val='1.2.3.7';
print "Exists\n"         if exists $data{$nam}{$val};

sub cleanupline {
  local ($_) = @_;
  s/[\n\r]//g;
  s/^[ \t]+//g;
  s/[ \t]+/ /g;

  return $_;
}
[download]

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

many thanks for the timely help. Lets leave the 2 slight errors as exercise for other seekers :-)