how to attribute all the devices to the names
I guess you want to build a Hash of Arrays (HoA)
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
my $infile = 'text.txt';
open IN,'<',$infile
or die "Could not open $infile : $!";
my $name;
my %hash = ();
while (<IN>){
s/^\s+|\s+$//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;
poj