I am having difficulty manipulating column based data using Perl in an AWK/Excel like way. There are some posts on stackoverflow that are similar that I am looking to do but not exactly. This is the closest example: http://stackoverflow.com/a/9179682/2379629 I am trying to sum and count multiple (many & variable) columns in Perl based on unique values in a "base" column. For example if this is the data set, I may want to use either the first column or second column as the "base" column. I then want to count & sum column's (fields) 3 & 4 for each value in the "Base" column. But I dont only want to do this for columns 3 & 4. I want the column numbers to be variable based on my input data set & my defined columns. here is an example: 
__DATA__
U1     ID1     100     280
U1     ID1     137     250
U2     ID2     150     375
U1     ID2     100     100
U3     ID1     100     600
U9     ID3     137     200

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example output: (Field[0])
U1     3     337     3     630     
U2     1     150     1     375
U3     1     100     1     600
U9     1     137     1     200

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or 
example output: (Field[1])
ID1     3     300     3     1130
ID2     2     250     2     475
ID3     1     137     1     200

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I could do that by modifying: $fields[0] to 0 or 1. But I cannot figure out how to dynamically set the number of columns. I believe I may need something like this below, where I can loop for each column. And chose the columns (fields) that I want to use in an @column = (1,2,10,20). 
$res{$fields[0]}{$column}{instance}++;
$res{$fields[0]}{$column}{volume} += $fields[$column];

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I want to avoid the below, because then I need to write 2 lines of code for each column that I want to manipulate and it would make it harder to change the columns that I want. 
$res{$fields[0]}{instance}++;
$res{$fields[0]}{volume} += $fields[1];
$res{$fields[0]}{instance2}= (<insert code to count field[2]>)
$res{$fields[0]}{volume2} += $fields[2];

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In reply to Perl Sum & Count column based data by ler224

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