As for number one, that's just throwing away the first line. It's just the normal readline diamond operator in void context (technically the scalar is superfluous, but I put it in out of habit). The return value is being discarded rather than being saved anywhere (my $toss = <CUR> would have done just the same thing with a (useless) temporary).

As for the data structure, it's a hash of hashes. The top level hash (%data) has keys that are the primary key from your data file (the names), and the corresponding value is a hash of key/value pairs from the various data files. Add something like the following to the end of the program and you can see what it looks like: 

...
use Data::Dumper qw( Dumper );
print Dumper( \%data );

[download]

See also perldoc perldsc.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Merging files by Fletch
in thread Merging files by ellem

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.