What are you trying to optimize? Are you trying to get an even distribution of data across a fixed number of drives? Efficiently fill drives of fixed size? The latter is (as AppleFritter points out) the knapsack problem.

For case 1), a simple and quite effective solution is to go from largest object to smallest, putting it in the least filled bin. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %bins = (
    A => 0,
    B => 0,
    C => 0,
    D => 0,
);

my %dir;
my $int;
while(<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my ($size, $name) = split /\s+/;
    $name .= ++$int if $dir{$name}; # Disabiguation; all your names ar
+e identical
    $dir{$name} = $size;
}

for my $name (sort {$dir{$b} <=> $dir{$a}} keys %dir) {
    my ($smallest) = sort {$bins{$a} <=> $bins{$b}} keys %bins;
    $bins{$smallest} += $dir{$name};
}

print Dumper(\%bins);

[download]
output: 
$VAR1 = {
          'A' => '9885811019',
          'D' => '9885704251',
          'C' => '9885960464',
          'B' => '9885704533'
        };

[download]

For case 2), you would put it in the smallest available space in which it fits. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $max = 10**10;
my $new_bin = 'A';
my %bins;

my %dir;
my $int;
while(<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my ($size, $name) = split /\s+/;
    $name .= ++$int if $dir{$name}; # Disabiguation; all your names ar
+e identical
    $dir{$name} = $size;
}

DIR_LOOP: for my $name (sort {$dir{$b} <=> $dir{$a}} keys %dir) {
    for my $bin_name (sort {$bins{$b} <=> $bins{$a}} keys %bins) {
        if ($bins{$bin_name} + $dir{$name} < $max) {
            $bins{$bin_name} += $dir{$name};
            next DIR_LOOP;
        }
    }
    $bins{$new_bin++} = $dir{$name};
}

print Dumper(\%bins);

[download]
outputs 
$VAR1 = {
          'A' => '9999831421',
          'D' => '9543689031',
          'C' => '9999660101',
          'B' => '9999999714'
        };

[download]

Update: Added code

#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

In reply to Re: Computer science Problem - single dimension bin packing by kennethk
in thread Computer science Problem - single dimension bin packing by davis

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