I'll modify your example code to help you do some simple sorting. Now, this is likely not the most efficient way to do it, but since you have a small dataset and you are new to perl, this can help you get started.

use strict;
use warnings;

open (SOMELIST, "somelist") or die "Cannot open file $!\n";

my %sort_data;
while (my $record = <SOMELIST>) {
        my @one_line = split(/,/, $record);

        while (exists $sort_data{$one_line[1]}) {
                 $one_line[1] = "$one_line[1]" . " "; #add a blank for
+ uniqueness
        }
        $sort_data{$one_line[1]} = $record; #store it by 2nd column
}
close (SOMELIST);


foreach my $line (sort {$a cmp $b} keys %sort_data) {
        print "$sort_data{$line}";
}
[download]

Like I said, this isn't the most efficient or even best method, but it is simple enough that you can hopefully see what is going on.


(2006-11-18 17:21 GMT) Edited my perl code to remove a couple of syntax errors. - Thanks Grandfather for pointing them out.