Thanks for all the suggestions, but I'm still hitting a road block. I don't want to post too much of my code as I am trying to really understand hashes instead of someone just fixing my code.
I think a better question for me now is, how can I pass variables into a hash. Here is a snipit of my code, the variables are defined outside of the while loop. 
while <(inFile)> {
     my @record = split /\|/, $_;
     my %eslist = $record[3];
}

[download]
Ultimately I want to output the unique entries in eslist but I can't even get it to count the number of keys in the hash and I'm getting a "odd number of elements in hash assignment" errors when using use warnings. I'm guessing there is something wrong with how I am trying to pass $record3 into the hash.
When defining the hash I've tried %eslist; and %eslist=(); but I still get the same errors.

In reply to Re^2: Learning about hashes by molson
in thread Learning about hashes by molson

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