#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use Data::Dumper; my $infile = 'text.txt'; open IN,'<',$infile or die "Could not open $infile : $!"; my $name; my %hash = (); while (){ s/^\s+|\s+$//g; # trim leading/trailing spaces my ($col1,$col2) = split /\s+/,$_,2; if ($col1 eq 'name'){ $name = $col2; } elsif ($col1 eq 'device') { push @{$hash{$name}},$col2; } else { # skip line } } close IN; print Dumper \%hash;