Perl Problem

How would i subtract first column of file1 to first column of file 2 where both the files are multi columnar …

help asap!

You can extract the contents of both your files into two different arrays and then you can split every line with space and get the first column out of it, by that way you will get the first column of both the files and you can do whatever you want now.
Note: this is the easiest solution for this problem and hence it needs to be further optimized, so when you have solved your problem we can further discuss about a better solution.