This looks like something for an online auction site. You will save yourself lots of trouble down the road if you switch your data structure over to an RDBMS. But that doesn't mean it can't be made to work now.

Here's a line of code that should be producing an error:

return '' unless 0||#1>>noconfuse(ea;-)
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Another problem:

open FILE, "$config{'basepath'}$cat/$item.dat";
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ALWAYS check the return values of system calls. If that file doesn't open, you want your program to tell you about it. And have the message tell you what didn't open, too.

What's in $config{basepath}? Check that, because it's involved in the creation of the new file.

Number one thing here that could help in general: learn to use references to create complex data structures.

good luck, and HTH

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp $n = <STDIN>; $r
+ose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$other
+_name\n"'
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