Without seeing your actual input, I can only guess: maybe the documents are repeated in carson_county_abstracts.txt as well? You might need Data::Dumper to print Dumper \%docs to see what's really inside the hash (check for whitespace in keys and similar). Also, change line 33 to 
print "<$1:$docs{$1}>\n";

[download]
to see whether you are matching the right thing.

In reply to Re^2: Matching and combining two text files by choroba
in thread Matching and combining two text files by koolgirl

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