That's cute, but it doesn't quite do what was asked. It prints each file's entries per output row, when what's needed is each file per output column. Unfortunately that transposition greatly complicates the task. Either you need to read all the files into memory in some data structure, or open all the files and for every line that is to be output, read one entry per filehandle (see holli's answer). For the sake of completeness, here's a way to read all the data into a "hash of arrays" data structure. The keys are the names of the data files, and the values are references to the data read from each data file.

If the only goal here is to print out the data, I would do it holli's way. Reading all the files into memory into one big data structure wouldn't scale very well.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my @files = glob('data/*');
my %filedata;   

for my $file (@files) {
   open my $fh, "<$file" or die "Ack, Can't open $file";
   chomp( my @data = <$fh> );
   close $fh;
   $filedata{$file} = \@data;
}
print Dumper(\%filedata);
[download]

$VAR1 = {
          'test/bb' => [
                         '5.6',
                         '5.7',
                         '5.9'
                       ],
          'test/aa' => [
                         '1.3',
                         '1.4',
                         '1.5'
                       ]
        };
[download]

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