"Thank you a lot!"

You're welcome a lot!

    "Will the following code work for me?"

Well, I'm tempted to ask -- "what happens when you try?".  The best way to learn is, after all, by trying.

I do see that you're trying to initialize @files from a list reference ['tab1.txt','tab2.txt']; which likely won't do what you're expecting (you'll get a single item in @files, which itself is a reference to the 2-item list).

Better to declare it like this:

my @files = ('tab1.txt','tab2.txt');

# Or, using the "quote-word" function "qw",
# which lets you omit the quotes and the comma:

my @files = qw( tab1.txt tab2.txt );
[download]

Furthermore, you're creating a variable $hash_key which you're never assigning to, but rather trying to perform a regex substitution on with:

    my $hash_key =~ s/\.txt//; # generate hash key
[download]

That's why, when I run it with use strict; and use warnings; I get the error:

Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at merge.pl line 16.
[download]

So I'm assuming what you want instead is to assign to the filename $file, and then perform the substitution to get the resulting hash key:

    (my $hash_key = $file) =~ s/\.txt//; # generate hash key
[download]

A final thought:  make liberal use of Data::Dumper to see what data a given data structure contains at any time.  For example, to see the entire contents of $ptables after making each assignment:

$ptables{$hash_key} = [ @string_array ]; # save all strings to the has
+h
print Dumper(\%ptables);                 # use "\" to pass reference o
+f hash
[download]

Update:  fixed typo (thanks johngg).

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