in reply to Putting text file into a hash
Ciao, remluvr.
Try loading your program into http://www.perlcritic.com/
This offers useful advice based on Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices. It offers 5 levels of severity, from gentle to brutal.
Better still, if you do not always have a web connection, and are happy using Vim as your editor, try downloading perl-support.vim from http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=556. This includes a Perl menu, with an option to run your code thru perlcritic. And perltidy as well.
Enjoy.