Yes, that's definitely one way to populate a nested hash. Here's a full-blown example that includes reading the files. I've written the example much more verbosely than I would normally in hopes it makes it more clear. This does not go on with sorting and lookups, just purely how to populate a hash from the files.

use warnings;
use strict;

use Data::Dumper;

my %app_map;

open my $fh1, '<', 'app.txt' or die $!;

while (my $line = <$fh1>){
    my ($app, $mem, $lang) = split /\s+/, $line;
    $app_map{$app}{mem} = $mem;
    $app_map{$app}{lang} = $lang;
}

close $fh1 or die $!;

open my $fh2, '<', 'app2.txt' or die $!;

while (my $line = <$fh2>){
    my ($app, $cpu, $cores) = split /\s+/, $line;
    $app_map{$app}{cpu} = $cpu;
    $app_map{$app}{cores} = $cores;
}

close $fh2 or die $!;

print Dumper \%app_map;

[download]

...and given the two files look like this (app.txt):

App1     4     Perl
App2     8     Java
App3     8     Java
App4     4     PHP
App5     8     C#

[download]

...and app2.txt:

App1     1.5     2
App2     2.5     4
App3     2.8     4
App4     2.8     2
App5     2.8     2

[download]

Output:

$VAR1 = {
          'App5' => {
                      'lang' => 'C#',
                      'cores' => '2',
                      'cpu' => '2.8',
                      'mem' => '8'
                    },
          'App1' => {
                      'cores' => '2',
                      'cpu' => '1.5',
                      'mem' => '4',
                      'lang' => 'Perl'
                    },
          'App4' => {
                      'cpu' => '2.8',
                      'cores' => '2',
                      'mem' => '4',
                      'lang' => 'PHP'
                    },
          'App3' => {
                      'cpu' => '2.8',
                      'cores' => '4',
                      'mem' => '8',
                      'lang' => 'Java'
                    },
          'App2' => {
                      'mem' => '8',
                      'cores' => '4',
                      'cpu' => '2.5',
                      'lang' => 'Java'
                    }
        };

[download]

In reply to Re: Multiple File handling and merging records from 2 files by stevieb
in thread Multiple File handling and merging records from 2 files by kris1511

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