Thank you for all of the information! The new code was missing the association of $val in the else statement so it was added and the new code looks like: $1 = time stamp $2 = error message $3 = unique identifer I am not sure if the time stamp information is going to be used. 

            while(<RPT>)
            {
                chomp;
                if (/^(\D+.*\d{4}\s+)(\D+.*)(\w{11})$/)
                {
                    $key = $3;
                    $msg = $2;
                    fmt_rpt($msg);
                    if (exists($analysis{$key}))
                    {
                    $analysis{$key} .= $msg;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                    $val = $msg;
                    $analysis{$key} = $val;
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    print "Program Error 2\n";
                    exit 1;
                }

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For me I would rather build one hash table instead of multiple hash tables and then merging them. To me it seems like a waste what are your thoughts?

In reply to Re^2: Hash Trouble by tc1364
in thread Hash Trouble by tc1364

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