Here is the killer question. I have files relating to the 24 hours of the day, so i wish to loop them by file name $hour = 00 = 01 = 02 etc up to 23,

That part's very easy. Use a foreach loop with the range operator:

foreach my $hour (map { sprintf "%02d", $_ } 0 .. 23) {
   # Do Stuff Here
}
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and i want to take all the data out of each file and put it into a hash.

So within the foreach loop, you will open the file for that hour and then read from the file using a the angle-brackets operator, like <FILEHANDLE>, probably repeatedly (e.g., using a while loop), parse the result, and store it in a hash. The parsing part is going to depend somewhat on what your data looks like, but most simple assignments like this can be done with split or a simple regular expression pattern match. Then store it in your hash like this: $hash{$key} = $value; If you need more help with that part, you'll have to give us more information about what your data looks like, which part is the hash key, and which part is the value.

It would also be possible to do the thing as a list transformation, feeding the list-context file read through map and into the hash, but for a beginner the other way is probably easier.

But i want it to just keep one of each unique type.

I'm not sure what the word "type" means in this sentence, but if you use a string representation of the type as the hash key, then you'll end up with just one value for each key, because that's what hashes do. If you assign each value you run into, the hash will remember the last one assigned. If you want the first one, you can make the assignment contingent on there not already being a value, like so: $hash{$key} = $value unless exists $hash{$key}; That way you'd only get the first value for each key.

My files contain "perl.exe , svchost.exe etc"

I'm not sure exactly what this means. Do you mean that you have perl installed on your computer? If so, I think we sort of assumed that would be the case if you're writing programs in Perl.

I can do this, however i wish to increment the keys() of each value when it comes across a duplicate

I am not at all sure what you mean by this. Storing a value in a hash using a key that hadn't already been used will cause keys() to return a value one larger than before. Is your key coming out of the data you're parsing, or do you need to make up a key for each line? One way to do that would be to count the lines (using a counter variable that you add one to each time you read a line) and use (a stringification of) that number as the hash key for the data you just read. (You don't have to manually stringify the number; perl will do that automatically when you use it as a hash key.)

foreach my $hour (map { sprintf "%02d", $_ } 0 .. 23) {
   # Do Stuff Here
}
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No need to use sprintf there, just use strings:

foreach my $hour ( '00' .. '23' ) {
   # Do Stuff Here
}
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ok so i have


$hour = "00";
while ($hour < 25)
{
 $infile = "$hour.txt";
 open  (LOG, $infile)
  while <LOG>
   {
    #PUT EACH NEW LINE INTO THE HASH
   }
}
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sorry by "perl.exe" i mean each line of my text files holds a process the computer is doing do

"SNDSrvc.exe
SPBBCSvc.exe
symlcsvc.exe
spoolsv.exe
AluSchedulerSvc.exe
svchost.exe
btwdins.exe"
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And i am trying to make my hash hold
%hash = ("btwdins.exe", 1, "spoolsv.exe", 1, "svchost.exe", 4,);
So it takes all the lines from the text files but increments the value for every duplicate.
So if svchost.exe is in four text files, or four times in one file, its key and value would be "svchost.exe", 4.

My txt files are already parsed as each *.exe is on a new line. I hope this helps and is not to complicated. Any help is much much appreciated, my brain is frazzled.

Detecting duplicates are what Tiggers and hashes do best:


while (<LOG>) {
   # Assume name of program is in $_
   chomp;
   $hash{$_}++;
}
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The hash key will be created and the value set to undef (zero), then incremented on the first time around. Subsequent occurances of the same key will increment the value.

By the way, a small thing, but be careful when you use a leading zero on a numeric - it converts it to octal.

You forgot to increment $hour:

$hour = "00";
while ($hour < 25) {
 $infile = "$hour.txt";
 open  LOG, '<', $infile;
 while <LOG> {
    #PUT EACH NEW LINE INTO THE HASH
 }
 $hour++;
}
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That's one reason I'd suggested a foreach loop, because it takes care of that automatically. It also takes care of the initial assignment, too. But the while loop will get the job done also, with this addition.

And i am trying to make my hash hold %hash = ("btwdins.exe", 1, "spoolsv.exe", 1, "svchost.exe", 4,); So it takes all the lines from the text files but increments the value for every duplicate.

Ah, I see. So the strings that come out of the hour files (one per line) are themselves filenames, and you want to use those as the hash keys, and make the value be the count of the number of times they occur? In that case, you can just increment the value each time, as cdarke suggests.

---

Sanity? Oh, yeah, I've got all kinds of sanity. In fact, I've developed whole new kinds of sanity. You can just call me "Mister Sanity". Why, I've got so much sanity it's driving me crazy.

This code reads values from STDIN and either creates or increments a hash appropriately. When you enter "Q" it will terminate and output the values...

use strict;
my %hash;
while(<STDIN>){
  chomp;
  last if $_ =~ /^q$/i; # quit if 'q' is entered
  if(exists $hash{$_}){ # exists, so increment
    $hash{$_}++;
  }
  else{                 # doesn't exist, so set to 1
    $hash{$_} = 1;
  }
}

my @array = sort keys %hash; # let's make the output sorted...
foreach(@array){
  print "$_ : $hash{$_}\n";
}
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Is that what you meant?

map{$a=1-$_/10;map{$d=$a;$e=$b=$_/20-2;map{($d,$e)=(2*$d*$e+$a,$e**2
-$d**2+$b);$c=$d**2+$e**2>4?$d=8:_}1..50;print$c}0..59;print$/}0..20
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  if(exists $hash{$_}){ # exists, so increment
    $hash{$_}++;
  }
  else{                 # doesn't exist, so set to 1
    $hash{$_} = 1;
  }
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That can be more simply written as:

  $hash{$_}++;
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But I think that the OP wants to increment the hash key instead of the value:

  $_++ while exists $hash{$_};
  $hash{$_}++;
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