Hopefully you can tell what I'm trying to do.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure at all what you're attempting to do with that last line. Could you explain a bit more?

On a very minor note: unless you've changed the value of $/ somewhere earlier in your script, the chomp @row line in your while() loop probably isn't doing anything.

Actually, you could get rid of @rows altogether and just assign the output of the split to @data{@fields}, but whether you should is a somewhat 'religious' issue that has no bearing on the question you are actually asking. :)

UPDATE: Is $menudir supposed to be an array reference of the value of key 'ven' from each of the hash references? If so, you might try something like:

my $menudir = [map { $_->{ven} } @records];
[download]

- Matt Riffle