thanks for the input Fishmonger! I decided this will be the way to go. I am just having one issue as I am not very familar with hashes at all. Been doing Perl things for quite a while, but hashes or key-value pairs never crossed my mind as a hash of arrays.

that said, I figured out how to get the access part or key out of the hash, but I need to now address the elements of the arrays. For example: If I pull the keys into an array, then I can address them. Maybe there is a more direct way, and that would be nice too. But I also need to figure out how to get say element 0 from the dev array. Help is appreciated! 

my %files = (
    dev    => [qw(testd.txt testd1.txt testd2.txt testd3.txt)],
    prod   => [qw(testp.txt testp1.txt testp2.txt testp3.txt)],
    report => [qw(testr.txt testr1.txt testr2.txt testr3.txt)],
    qptool => [qw(testq.txt testq1.txt testq2.txt testq3.txt)],
);

@flags = keys %files;

[download]

This gets the keys from the hash.

In reply to Re^2: Logic Issues with conditionals by jmneedhamco
in thread Logic Issues with conditionals by jmneedhamco

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