The new code was missing the association of $val

Not at all. There's no reason to do
$val = $msg;
$analysis{$key} = $val;
when
$analysis{$key} = $msg;
suffices.

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?

To which multiple hashes are you refering? You mean if you if you were to keep the timestamp? You could do something like:

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

[download]

See perllol for details. This would be a HoA (Hash of Arrays), which is similar to the mentioned AoA (Array of Arrays).

In reply to Re^3: Hash Trouble by ikegami
in thread Hash Trouble by tc1364

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