Why cant it be a newbie getting to grips with programming, who wants to change some existing code he has found?

It certainly can - therefore I answered with the pointers to the solution GrandFather provided in code - it would have helped you in either case.

I just needed to testing whether a particular hash holds the information I need.

Then why didn't you state that in your posting? While printing the whole datastructure and scanning it manually is surly working, solutions to search for particular values/keys in an arbitrary structured hash aren't that hard to achieve either :-)

Acting as anonymonk and asking seemingly simple to answer questions doesn't help getting a lot of trust in advance, at least with me.

A newbie getting to grips with programming in Perl could certainly go to alot of places worse than perlmonks, but not that many better suited to advance your skills: Please register an account, read Welcome to the Monastery! Make yourself at home., have a look around - and be indeed welcome.

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