Alternative to my previous reply, if you don't want to "dive into" Perl Data Structures:

The problem statement turns into: "how to represent multiple messages?"

The most flexible is: as an array of individual messages. However, if you are certain there won't be, e.g., newlines in your messages, you can use that as a delimiter. That would make: In adddelays: 
         $delaylist{ $_ } .= $msg . "\n";

[download]
In listdelays: 
    foreach (@nicks) {
        print "--> \cB$_\cB:\n";
        print "$_\n" for split /\n/, $delaylist{ $_ };
    }

[download]
and finally, in delayer: 
        print ("query $nick $_") for split /\n/, $delaylist{$nick};

[download]
Luckily, split omits trailing empty fields, otherwise the code in adddelays would have to be more complicated. Thanks perl for autovivification and DWIM :-)

In reply to Re^3: Script replaces instead of add by soonix
in thread Script replaces instead of add by geekism

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.