diamondsandperls,

Perhaps our continued conversation got buried in the nested postings above. However, assembling the suggestions in those postings (plus a couple of minor tweaks) into a single script yields the following:

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

my %files;

for (<*.txt *.docx>) {
    next unless /^(\d+.\d+.\d+.\d+)/;
    chomp;
    push @{ $files{$1} }, $_;
}

for my $ip ( keys %files ) {
    say 'Adding ' . @{ $files{$ip} } . " file(s) to archive $ip.zip";
    zip \@{ $files{$ip} } => "$ip.zip" or die "zip failed: $ZipError\n
+";
}

say 'Done!';
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