If your list is short, using grep on an array is fine. But this means that you are reading the whole array (second list) each time, which is quite inefficient if the list is long. In that case, using a hash for the second list is a better solution. Re-using toolic's data sample, it could look like this:

use warnings;
use strict;

my @foo = qw/tom steve bill roger bob/;
my %bar = (roger => 99, steve => 56, ted => 88, tom => 54);
for my $name (@foo) {
    print "$name : $bar{$name} \n" if exists $bar{$name};
}
[download]

which prints:

tom : 54
steve : 56
roger : 99
[download]

I understand that you are reading your data from files, so populating a hash is not more complicated than filling an array. You just have to do the split before populating the hash, instead of doing it later.

Actually, even with a short list, I think that I would probably prefer the hash-based solution.

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