in reply to Counting frequency of occurrence - what am I doing?

That means @bin is a two dimensional perl array. It is technically a one-dimensional array of array references.

You can simplify your data decoding with split

while (<>) { my ($mag,$abu) = split; # . . . }
There is nothing wrong with unpack there, but it is more fragile if the data format is chancy.

After Compline,
Zaxo