It's OK if the IPs are random, as your regex will match any IPv4 address. Those in the data set are just for the example script. That is, you'll need to to code the grabbing of the actual file names.

currently i am not zipping anything the code only prints the screen the Zip portion at the bottom of the screen when i run the code. i just used your code as is

Zip 192.168.1.1somestring.txt -> 192.168.1.1
Zip 192.168.1.1anotherRANDOMstring.txt -> 192.168.1.1
Zip 192.168.1.1.somerandom.docx -> 192.168.1.1
Zip 192.168.1.3somestring.txt -> 192.168.1.3
Zip 192.168.1.3anotherRANDOMstring.txt -> 192.168.1.3
Zip 192.168.1.3.somerandom.docx -> 192.168.1.3
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See my follow-up posting below.

man im clueless on this i know how to regex for my file list just not sure how to apply to the code you gave.

#!perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Modern::Perl;
use IO::Compress::Zip qw(zip $ZipError) ;




my %files;

while (<DATA>) {
    next unless /^(\d+.\d+.\d+.\d+)/;
    push @{ $files{$1} }, $_;
}

for my $ip ( keys %files ) {
    do { print "Zip $ip -> $_" }
      for @{ $files{$ip} };
}


__DATA__

my @files = <*.txt *.docx>;
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Hi, diamondsandperls.

You're certainly not clueless, as you've mostly done this work yourself.

Sorry, but I didn't mean to confuse the issue by using __DATA__, but it was for example only (gives a source of the data for the script). So, you can use what you've already done like this:

use Modern::Perl;
use IO::Compress::Zip qw(zip $ZipError) ;

my %files;

my @files = <*.txt *.docx>;

for (@files) {
    next unless /^(\d+.\d+.\d+.\d+)/;
    push @{ $files{$1} }, $_;
}

for my $ip ( keys %files ) {
    do { print "Zip $ip -> $_" }
      for @{ $files{$ip} };
}
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Place your zipping call within the do{} block (replacing the printing placeholder), noting that $ip contains the common IP address and $_ contains the complete file name to be zipped.

ps Modern::Perl contains both strict and warnings.