Thank you all for your interest and advice.

The comments that %pci_ids should have used parentheses and not braces just shows my ignorance.

I do have #!/usr/bin/perl -w and use strict, the data structure was so long that I thought I should remove everything but (what I thought were) the essentials.

Many thanks to McDarren for trying to help me understand what I was doing :) and graff for the script which I will have to take away and chew on.

Thanks again.