Straight from Perl Cookbook (well almost :-)
my @all_names = qw/john andy bill andy john julia bill/;
my %seen = ();
my @names = grep { ! $seen{$_} ++ } @all_names;
print join(' ', @names);
This prints
john andy bill julia, I'm sure you'll get other variations.
Update 1: Fixed typos in code D'oh.
Update 2: As TomDLux rightly pointed out, you may wish to sort the names alphabetically, if so just change line 3 to this:
my @names = sort grep { ! $seen{$_} ++ } @all_names;
Returning:
andy bill john julia (which is what I meant to do originally but ... err... didn't)
