Some quick observations about your code so far:

• Unless you are using a very old perl, you don't need the & before function calls: logToHash($_) will do just fine.
• You will find your debugging life much easier if you add use strict; use warnings; immediately after the shabang line.

As to your question about data structures and comparisons , perhaps you could be more specific about how you want to compare fields - are you counting the GET/POST requests for each user agent? each IP? each data? some combination of the three?

Your plans will affect your choice of data structure. For instance, if you want to count all HTTP requests with the same user agent, you will need an HoAoH hash where each key is a user agent and each value is an array containing all of request hashes sharing the same user agent.

You can build this hash most efficiently while you are reading in the data. Depending on your goals, you may be able to eliminate the AoH hash entirely and rely solely on the HoAoH hashes.

Best, beth

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