No, there isn't really any more elegant way. This is because the keys to a hash are (in theory) unordered, so saying something the "the second key" is meaningless.

Either use a parallel array or sort the keys before use: 

delete( @hash{(sort(keys{%hash}))[2..4]} );

will delete the 2nd through 4th sorted keys from the %hash.

In reply to Re: Removing a certain number of hash keys by eg
in thread Removing a certain number of hash keys by myocom

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