G'day Doozer,

"I don't think I am adding the new details for each box to the hash correctly."

That's not your problem (although there's probably a better way to achieve this). See DB_File - "How do I store complex data structures with DB_File?":

Although DB_File cannot do this directly, there is a module which can layer transparently over DB_File to accomplish this feat.

Check out the MLDBM module, available on CPAN in the directory modules/by-module/MLDBM.

The value you're associating with each $hash{$location} is the stringified representation of the hashref { 'Date Active' => $date_active, ... } (i.e. HASH(0xhex-digits)) — this is the string you can't use as a hash reference.

Regarding my comment "there's probably a better way to achieve this", consider using a hash slice (see perldata - Slices) instead of assigning each element of @box to a separate variable which is subsequently used just once as a value. Here's an example using a cutdown version of your code and data:

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
    my @STB_keys = ("Date Active", "Manufacturer");
    my %hash;
    my $line = "Zone1 - Box1,01/06/2011,Amstrad";
    my @box = split /,/ => $line;
    my $location = shift @box;
    @{$hash{$location}}{@STB_keys} = @box;
    say $hash{"Zone1 - Box1"}{"Date Active"};
    say $hash{"Zone1 - Box1"}{"Manufacturer"};
'
01/06/2011
Amstrad
[download]

Also, splitting a CSV file on a comma will break if any value contains a comma: Text::CSV is a better choice.

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