There's just too much wrong with your code to even begin trying to fix it. The secret to learning how to code is to do two things:

• 1) Start small - one liners, simple regexes, etc. Don't try to write full programs before you are comfortable with the basics of the language.
• 2) Read existing programs! Ever wonder why your English teacher gave you so much to read? Because we learn mainly via emulation and mimicry (blame it on evolution). Hence, to learn how to program you should consider reading quite a bit of existing/working code.

Here's an example that actually works as a one liner. I'm guessing it will be unacceptable to turn a one liner in as your homework answer so you'll have to figure out how it works before rewriting it.

E:>perl -ne "BEGIN{my %stuff = ()}; @items=split q|:
|; $stuff{$items[0]} += $items[1]; END{for(keys %stuff){print qq|$_:$s
+tuff{$_}\n|}};" fakedata.dat
blue:45
red:27
green:311
yellow:114
[download]

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