thpfft spoke:
this is a little garbled...
hehehe, you've peered through the looking-glass of my mind.

a hash of hashrefs each of which refers to a { destination => count } pair. which is easily built:

my %totals;
while (<LOGFILE>) {
    $totals{$1}->{$2}++ if m/(...)(...)(...)/;
}
[download]

This gives me an idea, but I'm not sure if I am seeing it correctly. $totals{$1} gets the first memory match from the regexp, and ->{$2} get's the second, then ->{$2} get's incremented, right?

hum, Maybe another example...
The values that I am concered with from my regexp look like:
(the destination IP address will change BTW)
SRC=192.168.0.10, DST=66.39.54.27

I then log the source IP, the destination IP, and how many accesses per destination. My output should hopefully be something like:

192.168.0.10 accessed 66.39.54.27 49 times.

...and in case i've completely missed the point, the main trouble you're probably having...
Not at all, I think you got it spot-on! I have been fooling around with that %ips hash quite a bit, and you've validated my thoughts that it's not going to work like that.

Which suggests that you haven't quite grasped how perl's hashes work
It's that obvious, huh? ;) I'm trying to use hashes more and more every day for this exact reason.

...Some time with perldata, perldsc and perllol will help...
I will definately start reading some over there, thanks.

...along with a bit of strictness
Yup, I do that, and with warnings too! I firmly understand the advantage of having Perl tell me "don't do that!" =) The bit of code I posted is just the 'counting' sub of a larger beast.

...and if possible the perl cookbook.
I got it.

Thanks for taking time to respond to my garbled posting. When I get stuck on something, I have a hard time explaining the issue, but if I could explain it I probably wouldn't be so stuck, if you know what I mean.