The reading should be straight forward, you can use split to access the individual fields.
Since you only want to write one item per group, I'd suggest you use a hash with the group as the keys, and every time you read a line you compare if the read date is older than the current date in the hash. If yes, you replace it.
In reply to Re: Pulling out oldest entries from a text file
by moritz
in thread Pulling out oldest entries from a text file
by Angharad
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