I think what you want is a hash-of-hashes data structure. The "outer" (main) hash would be keyed by the strings at the beginning of each line ("average1", "average2", etc). For each of those main hash elements, you have a sub-hash that stores the sum of values associated with the key string, and the number of times the key string occurred in the file.

Something like this would load that sort of hash, and then print summary values for each primary hash key: 

my %stats;

while (<>) {
    next unless ( /^(\w+):\s+([\d.]+)/ );
    $stats{$1}{count}++;
    $stats{$1}{sum} += $2;
}

printf( "%20s %5s %8s\n", "Name", "Count", "Average" );
for ( sort keys %stats ) {
    printf( "%19s: %5d %8.2f\n", $_, $stats{$_}{count},
             $stats{$_}{sum} / $stats{$_}{count} );
}

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In reply to Re: seeking advise on average value problem by graff
in thread seeking advise on average value problem by rangersfan

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