thank you for your post! however trying to implement your second solution I am failing to see how this is adding the common keys within my HoH? I am using strict and warnings, the code above was just a snip from the entire program. Here is the code I threw in and played with.

  my %total;
  my %subhash;
  foreach my $subhash (values %all_files) {
    foreach my $key (keys %$subhash) {
      my $junk = $total{$key} + $subhash{$key};
      print "$junk\n";
    }
}
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the results of adding this to total the values for the common keys always results in '0'? I have also tried creating a AoH instead but still have problems getting the correct accumalation... Here is the code for that.

  for my $i ( 0 .. $#AoH ) {
    for my $role (sort keys %{ $AoH[$i] } ) {
      my $tcount = $AoH[$i]{$role} + $AoH[$i]{$role};
      print "$role=$tcount\n";
    }
  }
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either way what I would like to accomplish is for each common key within the hash (either below the main array or main hash) accumalate the value for common keys...? maybe I'm just brain dead at this point from looking at it too long... thanks...