I have a program that will take, amongst other things, a column header as input and return data from just that field(s). Where I want to go with this is: 

<open FILE A>    #I can do this
<read data in column "X" (or "x", "y", "z")>    #I can do this
<return a subset of data>    #I can do this
<open FILE B>    #I begin to lose it here. 
<find all matching strings from previous subset>
<take as argument column labels>
<return data associated with "subset" and "column data">
<create FILE C>
<store data using new column labels>

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Syntax should be: 
merge  [ FILE A, $field, FILE B, $field ]

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In other words, lets say I have 2 files. File 1 has columns: 
full_name   rank   serial number

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File 2 has columns: 
last_name   address   phone number

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I want to take as input "full_name" (or whatever column I specify) from File 1, create a subset of data from the column "full_name", search File 2 for any matches, and return corresponding data from the column "address" and/or "phone number", depending on what I specified at the beginning. Write the results to <STDOUT> , labeling the new columns: 
new_name    current_address     current_phone

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So, for instance, I want to create a report that tells me the address and phone number of everyone named "Joe", regardless of last name. I suspect that I have to use references of some sort, but as I've been programming Perl for about a month, read about references, but haven't worked with them yet.. Thanks in advance for any light you all can shed on this one.

In reply to Merging Files: A Different Twist by Limo

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