Now that I understand what you are doing, here's code that generates the output you are looking for, albeit in a different order:

use strict;
use warnings;

my %mappings;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    next if ! /\S/;
    
    s/^\s+//;
    s/\s+$//;
    my ($mainfile, $subfiles) = split /\s*,\s*/;
    my @subfiles = split /\s*;\s*/, $subfiles;
    
    @subfiles = grep /\S/, @subfiles;
    $mappings{$mainfile}{$_} = 1 for @subfiles;
}

# Generate transitive relationships. ie: if A->B and B->C, then A->C
for my $A (keys %mappings) {
    for my $B (keys %{$mappings{$A}}) {
        ++$mappings{$A}{$_} for keys %{$mappings{$B}};
    }
}

for my $key (keys %mappings) {
    print "$key - $mappings{$key}{$_} -> $_\n" for keys %{$mappings{$k
+ey}};
}

__DATA__
 cancer,breast cancer; lung cancer; heart cancer; stomach cancer;
 breast cancer,foot cancer;
 foot cancer,some cancer;
 lung cancer,blood cancer; foot cancer;
 heart cancer,foot cancer;
 stomach cancer,foot cancer;
 blood cancer,some cancer;

[download]

Prints:

lung cancer - 2 -> some cancer
lung cancer - 1 -> blood cancer
lung cancer - 1 -> foot cancer
cancer - 1 -> some cancer
cancer - 1 -> lung cancer
cancer - 1 -> blood cancer
cancer - 1 -> breast cancer
cancer - 4 -> foot cancer
cancer - 1 -> heart cancer
cancer - 1 -> stomach cancer
blood cancer - 1 -> some cancer
breast cancer - 1 -> some cancer
breast cancer - 1 -> foot cancer
heart cancer - 1 -> some cancer
heart cancer - 1 -> foot cancer
foot cancer - 1 -> some cancer
stomach cancer - 1 -> some cancer
stomach cancer - 1 -> foot cancer

[download]
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re^5: out of memory problem by GrandFather
in thread out of memory problem by perlbeginner10

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