Thanks again Kenosis and thanks to everyone who replied. I was able to fix my program finally. I made a lot of modifications from my original program. Using the CSV module was a much better strategy for getting out the total number of sample_ids. I did find it very helpful to go back and check that all my arrays and hashes were storing what they in fact were storing.Thanks again for all your suggestion

I made a hash table with the sample_Id as keys and the line of text from the Merged_File with the sample id as a value. I used dumpvalue to display my hash contents and used a hash slice to print out the specific values I needed. Thanks to everyone dave

use Dumpvalue;


%id_lookup_table = map { ($Merged_Ids[$_], $merged_array[$_]) } 0..$#M
+erged_Ids;

    my $dumper = Dumpvalue -> new;        
    $dumper -> dumpValue(\%id_lookup_table);

        open(ERRORREPORT,"+<","reported_list.csv") or die "reported_li
+st.csv: $!";    
            print ERRORREPORT @id_lookup_table{(@sample_ids)};
        close ERRORREPORT;

'UCD12-00242-P' => "\"Joe Schmie\",ABD032,12-Feb-12,23-Feb-12,\"Whale 
+Tail Island, Fictitious Place\",USA,California,etc
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