I was wondering if anyone could help a desperate newbie with perl with the following question. I've been trying all day but with my perl book at work, I can't seem to anything relevant in google...or maybe am genuinely stupid with this. I have a file that looks something like the following: Bob April Bob April Bob March Mary August Robin December Robin April The output file I'm after is: Bob April April March Mary August Robin December April So that it lists each month in the order that it appears for each person. I tried making it into a hash but of course it wouldn't let me have duplicates so I thought I would like to have arrays for each name (in this example, Bob, Mary and Robin). I'm afraid to upload the code I've been trying to tweak because I know it'll be horribly wrong. I think I need to define(?) the array. Would this be correct? Any help would be greatly appreciated and I promise I will be studying more about perl in the meantime. Thank you for your time, patience and help. #!/usr/bin/perl -w while (<>) { chomp; if (defined $old_name) { $name=$1; $month=$2; if ($name eq $old_name) { $array{$month}++; } else { print "$old_name"; foreach (@array) { push (@array, $month); print "\t@array"; } print "\n"; @array=(); $array{$month}++; } } else { $name=$1; $month=$2; $array{month}++; } $old_name=$name; } print "$old_name"; foreach (@array) { push (@array, $month); print "\t@array"; } print "\n";