cool thanks for the detail, but now I have played a little with certain fields of a /etc/passwd file and I am back to the original problem...its printing the hash address not the actual values. All I need is to store the name,uid,gid and comments into a hash from the @{$dublin_aref} which is the glob of passwd files opened via <FILE>. thank you

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my @dublinaray  = glob("/home/user/passwd.*");
my $dublin_aref = \@dublinaray;
my %dublin_hosts = ();
my (@tmp_values,@dub_values,) = ();
my ($dub_key,$name,$uid,$gid,$cmts,$dub_values);

parse_file();

sub parse_file {

 foreach my $element ( @{$dublin_aref} ) {
  { local *FILE;
    open (FILE, "+<$element") or die "dublin file '$element' did not o
+pen: $!";
    local $/  = undef;
    ($dub_key)    = $element =~ m|\.(\w+\.\w+)\z|i;
    ($name) = (split /:/, <FILE>) [0];
    ($uid)  = (split /:/, <FILE>) [2];
    ($gid)  = (split /:/, <FILE>) [3];
    ($cmts) = (split /:/, <FILE>) [4];
    @tmp_values = ($name,$uid,$gid,$cmts);
    $dub_values = \@tmp_values;
    push ( @{$dublin_hosts{$dub_key}}, $dub_values );
  }
}

  while ( ($dub_key,$dub_values) =  each %dublin_hosts ) {
    print Dumper("$dub_key => @{$dub_values}\n");
     }
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The code below works, yet I am still trying to figure out why the above code does not:

open (FILE, "+</cygdrive/c/temp/passwd.oftappp1.hpux");
my (@values,$name,$uid,$gid,$comments) = ();
foreach my $file (<FILE>) {
    ($name)     = (split /:/ , $file) [0];
    ($uid)      = (split /:/ , $file) [2];
    ($gid)      = (split /:/ , $file) [3];
    ($comments) = (split /:/ , $file) [4];
    @values     = ($name,$uid,$gid,$comments);
    print join ("\t", @values,"\n");
}
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