G'day Mark.Allan,

"Does this make sense? it was hard for me to explain never mind write"

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure: hopefully, I got the gist of it. Here's some issues I found:

• There's some code that just won't work, e.g. a number of regexes have \s but the data you're trying to match (as shown) has 0, 1 or 2 spaces.
• You have a complicated way of determining parent and child config: was there a reason you didn't just look for PARENT CONFIG and CHILD CONFIG.
• In your description you have: e.g. "a hash called results{keyid}" — that's not the name of a hash, the key keyid appears nowhere in the code, there's a $results{$key} in the code but %results is neither declared nor populated.
• Three times in your description, you have: "$results{£key}{$dist_attr}" — obviously, your '$' key works; whatever sigil you intended when you entered '£' is almost certainly wrong; there's nothing like that in the code you posted so I can't even guess what was intended.
• In your code, you have a regex where you're matching and capturing the literal text 'completion' — you may have intended to capture something else; regardless, the captured data (which would have been $2) is not used anywhere.
• There maybe others.

Here's a script that captures the data you want. I'll leave you to format the output.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;

my $config_file = 'pm_1056046_parse_config.txt';
my $gen = 'parent';
my %cfg;

{
    local $/ = "DEPLOYED\n";
    open my $config_fh, '<', $config_file;

    while (<$config_fh>) {
        $gen = 'child' if /CHILD CONFIG/;
        /(\w+)\s+HOLDS\s+(\w+)/;
        $cfg{$gen}{$1}{holds} = $2 if $gen eq 'child';
        push @{$cfg{parent}{$1}{equals}} => /(total_\w+)/g if $gen eq 
+'parent';
    }

    close $config_fh;
}

for (keys %{$cfg{child}}) {
    print "$_ : @{$cfg{parent}{$cfg{child}{$_}{holds}}{equals}}\n";
}
[download]

Output:

$ pm_1056046_parse_config.pl
first_distribution : total_finish total_cancel
second_distribution : total_cancel
third_distribution : total_finish total_cancel
forth_distribution : total_dist total_finish total_cancel
[download]

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