in reply to Removing redundancy

Update Oops. I didn't see the "preserve order" bit. In that case, this won't do exactly what you want. Sorry. See the other (better) solutions...

This should do what you want...

use strict; my %data = (); while (<DATA>) { chomp; my ($col1, $col2) = split /\s+/; $data{$col1} .= "$col2 "; } print "$_: $data{$_}\n" foreach (sort keys %data); __DATA__ text1 text-a text2 text-b text3 text-c text1 text-d text3 text-e text3 text-f
Here's the explanation:
  1. The while loop goes through each line of input. In this case, each line in <DATA>.
  2. The line is then split on any whitespace into the two columns.
  3. To ensure uniqueness, the first column is used as the key name in a hash and the second column is appended to that.
  4. Then it prints each key, and its value using a foreach statement. The keys are also sorted.