Hi Guys, I am new to perl, I have a situation which is very similar to this, where my input rows are given below and I have to find the duplicates on the first column

green apple
green grapes
blue blueberries
orange pappaya
orange orange
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Output:
green apple/grapes
blue blueberries
orange pappaya/orange
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can one of you guys please explain this code... Thanks

What have you tried so far? Please post it here, inside <code></code> tags.

The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

googling it and trying to understand this code from sub print can you explain it

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $input_file  = 'HGDP.txt';
my $output_file = 'output.txt';

open my $fh, '<', $input_file
  or die "Unable to open for read $input_file: $!";
open my $out_fh, '>', $output_file
  or die "Unable to open for write $output_file: $!";

local $, = q{ };
local $\ = "\n";

my @rows;

my $static_i = 3;    # number of first unjoinable columns

sub print_rows {
    print {$out_fh} @{$rows[0]}[0 .. $static_i - 1], map {
        my @columns;
        foreach my $x (0 .. $#rows) {
            push @columns, $rows[$x][$_];
        }
        join q{/}, @columns;
    } $static_i .. $#{$rows[0]};
}

while (defined(my $line_1 = <$fh>)) {

    my ($x) = $line_1 =~ /^(\d+)/ or next;
    push @rows, [split q{ }, $line_1];

    while (defined(my $line_2 = <$fh>)) {
        next unless $line_2 =~ /^\d/;
        if ($line_2 =~ /^$x\b/) {
            push @rows, [split q{ }, $line_2];
        }
        else {
            print_rows();
            @rows = [split q{ }, $line_2];
            last;
        }
    }
}

print_rows();

close $fh;
close $out_fh;
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