That's cute, but it doesn't quite do what was asked. It prints each file's entries per output row, when what's needed is each file per output column. Unfortunately that transposition greatly complicates the task. Either you need to read all the files into memory in some data structure, or open all the files and for every line that is to be output, read one entry per filehandle (see holli's answer). For the sake of completeness, here's a way to read all the data into a "hash of arrays" data structure. The keys are the names of the data files, and the values are references to the data read from each data file.

If the only goal here is to print out the data, I would do it holli's way. Reading all the files into memory into one big data structure wouldn't scale very well. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my @files = glob('data/*');
my %filedata;   

for my $file (@files) {
   open my $fh, "<$file" or die "Ack, Can't open $file";
   chomp( my @data = <$fh> );
   close $fh;
   $filedata{$file} = \@data;
}
print Dumper(\%filedata);

[download]
$VAR1 = {
          'test/bb' => [
                         '5.6',
                         '5.7',
                         '5.9'
                       ],
          'test/aa' => [
                         '1.3',
                         '1.4',
                         '1.5'
                       ]
        };

[download]

In reply to Re^2: printing contents of small files into one larger one by virtualsue
in thread printing contents of small files into one larger one by Angharad

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.