in reply to Re^2: creating hashes recursively
in thread hashes recursively

If you really have '<$path', that's your problem. Single quotes don't expand a variable. Better off to use the 3-arg form of open(): 
open my($log), "<", $path or die "can't open $path: $!";
while (<$log>) {
  ...
}

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Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

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