If you don't feel like using the Tree module, you can build your data structure by temporarily storing the references to each hash in a separate hash, as follows.

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
my %data;

{
  my %temp;

  while (<DATA>) {
    chomp; /^(.*?):(.*?)$/;
    my $key = $2; my $value = $1;

    if (!defined $temp{$key}) { 
      $temp{$key} = {}; 
      $data{$key} = \%{$temp{$key}}; 
    };

    $temp{$key}{$value} = \%{$temp{$value}};

  };

}

print Dumper \%data;

__DATA__
b:a
c:a
d:b
e:c
f:c
[download]

This code generates the following dump of %data:

$VAR1 = {
          'a' => {
                   'c' => {
                            'e' => {},
                            'f' => {}
                          },
                   'b' => {
                            'd' => {}
                          }
                 }
        };
[download]

I'm not sure what you mean by I have no idea how to store this either. . If your looking for a way to save and load data to disk, you can use Data::Dumper and 'do' as follows.

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %saved = (
  'test1' => {
     'test2' => 'b'
   },
   'b' => [1,2,3,4],
   'test3' => 'x'
);

print "Constructed hash\n";
print Dumper \%saved;

open FILE, ">save.out";
print FILE Dumper \%saved;
close FILE;

my %loaded = %{do 'save.out'};

print "Loaded hash\n";
print Dumper \%loaded;
[download]

Be aware though that saving and loading hashes this way can be a security risk if your script and saved file have different read/write permissions for different users. (i.e. If security is set up in such a way that a user is unable to edit the Perl script, but is able to edit save.out, this would introduce a way for that user to execute code in the Perl script.)

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