You can save yourself some typing as Perl will auto-vivify the anonymous array for you if it doesn't exist already. Your

    if (!exists $people{$name}) {
        $people{$name} = [ $value ]; # store array with one value
    }
    else {
        push @{$people{$name}}, $value; # push 2nd,3rd,.. value on arr
+ay
    }
[download]

can become

    push @{$people{$name}}, $value;
[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG