This seems to be fine, but I do not understand why you insist on using a reference to a hash of hashes. Why not simply a hash of hashes? Something like this: 
sub getPeople {
     my $file = 'list.txt';
     my %people;
     open( LIST, "< $file" ) or die "Can't open $file : $!";
     while (my $row = <LIST> ) {
          my ($id, $first, $last, $age) = (split /[\s=]/, $row)[1, 3, 
+5, 7];
          $people{$id} = {
                          id => $id,
                          first => $first,
                          last => $last,
                          age => $age
                         };
     }
     print Dumper(\$people);
     print "The person with ID 3 is $people{3}{first} $people{3}{last}
+\n";
     close LIST;
}

[download]
An additional remark is that both your $people hashref and my %people hash are lexically scoped to the subroutine and not accessible outside the sub. I guess you will probably need to return it to the calling routine or share it one way or another with the caller if it needs to be used outside the sub.

As a final note, I think you should compare your indentation with mine: I think that mine shows more clearly that the code after the end of the while loop still belongs to the subroutine definition. Taking the habit or properly indenting your code will save you a lot of debugging time when things get a bit complicated.

In reply to Re^5: Having an Issue updating hash of hashes by Laurent_R
in thread Having an Issue updating hash of hashes by perlguyjoe

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.