I'm lost about where you're lost. Here's the things that I think you'll need to know to do this task, but I'm not sure which of these you know and which you don't.

• how to look at @ARGV
• how to walk through an array with a foreach loop
• how to assign things to a hash
• what a hash can contain
• the difference between \ and / as it applies to Perl
• how to recognize the difference between file_1 and a,b,c on the command line
• how to turn a,b,c into a 3-element list
• how to populate an arrayref
• how to read a file into an arrayref
• how to recognize the things from the file to figure out where they'll go
• other things that I didn't think of when I was coming up with this list

I enjoy helping people. But I keep wondering "help you with WHAT?" on each post. Ask a more specific question, perhaps any of the above. If it's all of the above, then I suggest you need a good book or two, or spend some time with Perl tutorials.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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