Hey folks, My database currently has just over 50,000 equipment records. A couple thousand of those are duplicated in some fashion or another. What I need to do is to identify those records. All was going well and I actually got the records identified using an array of arrays. A little about my solution so far: I extracted all serial number / id field pairs, then I removed all non word characters, and some other tokens that I knew would be a problem. What I got was a text file that had the clean serial number and all id fields on the same line, which is exactly what I wanted. Then I got to thinking, "Man it would be nice if I had the rest of the information so that I don't have to individually look these up." Sounded pretty easy, I decided to use a hash of arrays of arrays, this is where it got dicey. My code 
for my $row ( @{$serials}) {
        my $equ = $$row[$equIndex];
        my $pmf = $$row[$pmfIndex];
        my $pro = $$row[$proIndex];
        my $serial = $$row[$serialIndex];
        my $usr = $$row[$usrIndex];
        my $date = $$row[$dateIndex];
        my $clean = $$row[$cleanIndex];
        if ($duplicates{$clean}) {
                push (@{$duplicates{$clean}}, [$equ, $pmf, $pro, $seri
+al, $usr, $date]);
        } else {
            %duplicates = ($clean => [$equ, $pmf, $pro, $serial, $usr,
+ $date]);
        }
    }

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This is the offending snippet. What this does is create a hash key from the clean serial. The first value is created as an array, which is fine, but when a duplicate comes around I push it on and it adds it to the end of the first array, inside the array. What I want is: 
clean1 -> [[equ info] -> [equ info]]
clean2 -> [equ info]
clean3 -> [[equ info] -> [equ info] -> [equ info]]

[download]
so I can then print everything with an outer array length greater than 1 to a file and only get the duplicates. What I am getting is 
clean1 -> [equ info, array]
clean2 -> [equ info]
clean3 -> [equ info, array, array]

[download]
I have tried pushing the values into arrays first. I tried using two arrays and pushing the values onto 1 and then push that array onto another. What I do know is that I am making this much harder than it is, but I am stumped.

In reply to hash of arrays of arrays by tnyflmngs

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