Evening monks. Sorry to be asking such a simple question, but it seems that this one has my brain in a knot. I have a directory with a bunch of JSON files that look like this:

[
   {
      "name" : "bob",
      "title" : "janitor",
      "email" : "",
      "iq" : "180",
      "favorite_food" : "wagyu steak"
   },
   {
      "name" : "joe",
      "title" : "software engineer",
      "email" : "",
      "iq" : "80",
      "favorite_food" : "raw hamburger"
   }
]
[download]

I am attempting to merge these files together so that they look like this:

{
   "People" : [
      {
         "name" : "bob",
         "title" : "janitor",
         "email" : "",
         "iq" : "180",
         "favorite_food" : "wagyu steak"
      },
      {
         "name" : "joe",
         "title" : "software engineer",
         "email" : "",
         "iq" : "80",
         "favorite_food" : "raw hamburger"
      },
      {
         "name" : "sandy",
         "title" : "dishwasher",
         "email" : "",
         "iq" : "240",
         "favorite_food" : "filet mignon"
      },
      {
         "name" : "george",
         "title" : "software engineer",
         "email" : "",
         "iq" : "14",
         "favorite_food" : "tacos"
      }
   ]   
}
[download]

The code I am using to do this is here:

#!/usr/local/perl5/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use JSON::XS;
use File::Slurp qw( read_file );

open(my $fh, '<', '/tmp/test') or die $!; # contains list of file name
+s

my @fields;
my $uuts = {};
while(<$fh>) {
    chomp;
    next if !-e "/tmp/files/$_.json";
    my $decoded = decode_json( read_file("/tmp/files/$_.json") );
    push @fields, $decoded;
}
$uuts->{People} = [ @fields ];
my $coder = JSON::XS->new->ascii->pretty->allow_nonref;
my $pretty_printed_unencoded = $coder->encode ($uuts);
print $pretty_printed_unencoded;
[download]

Now, the problem I am facing is that the output looks like this:

{
   "People" : [
      [
         {
            "name" : "bob",
            "title" : "janitor",
            "email" : "",
            "iq" : "180",
            "favorite_food" : "wagyu steak"
         },
         {
            "name" : "joe",
            "title" : "software engineer",
            "email" : "",
            "iq" : "80",
            "favorite_food" : "raw hamburger"
         }
      ],
      [
         {
            "name" : "sandy",
            "title" : "dishwasher",
            "email" : "",
            "iq" : "240",
            "favorite_food" : "filet mignon"
         },
         {
            "name" : "george",
            "title" : "software engineer",
            "email" : "",
            "iq" : "14",
            "favorite_food" : "tacos"
         }
      ]
   ]
}
[download]

I don't want the content of each file to be its own array. I want People to be an array whose contents is the content of each file. Yet, for the life of me I cannot seem to accomplish this.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you Monks!

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