Thanks APL,

This problem has gone way far off. Let's Start over as you suggested.

simple questions: If you have a tab delimited file with e.g. 4 columns. How would you read it over and over to extract data with different conditions. Let's focus on col4. If the values range from 0-20. I want to read extract the lines that col4 ==4, save number of lines read (met the condition) somewhere. Then automatically increase it to 5 and see how may lines this time will be extracted, and then add your criteria (this time col4==5) and the number of liens read (just count not the actual lines) to the somewhere that you had for the previous iteration.

You will end up with a structure like this. 

key(criteria)    value (number of lines extracted)
0=>2000 
1=>1800
2=>1600

and so on.

[download]

Your thoughts are very appreciated.

In reply to Re^2: Hash making by sesemin
in thread Hash making by sesemin

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