u were right about that, silly me and yet, now i have an incredibly trivial problem. For some reason, when i leave it as printing to the command window, it spews out the exact stuff that i want, yet when i tell it to print to a filehandle, the file is empty afterwards... here's my code:

#! /usr/bin/perl
print "File Location?";
my $data_file = <>;
open(DATA, $data_file);
my @list;
while (<DATA>) {
  chomp;
  my (%hash, @rest);
  ($hash{first}, $hash{date}, @rest) = split(",", $_);
  for my $r (@rest) {
    my ($k, $v) = split(' ', $r, 2);
    $hash{$k} = $v;
  }
  push(@list, \%hash);
};
my %seen;
for (@list) { for (keys %$_) { $seen{$_}++ } };
delete $seen{first};
delete $seen{date};
my @allkeys = ('first', 'date', sort keys %seen);
my @keys = (sort keys %seen);
open(DATAOUT, ">1.temp");
while(<DATAOUT>) {
for my $h (@list) {
print DATAOUT join(",", $h->{first}, $h->{date},
            map { $_." ".$h->{$_} } @keys), "\n";
}
}
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