Yes, I do agree with your idea of simplicity...Open the file, dump in an array, then sort. I would like to solve it in two ways however, and avoid editing so much of the scripts. (This is a series of about 6 different scripts *reaching for aspirin*, all with user defined variables linked together in very odd ways....hence the problem I'm having here).

The data is tab deliminated and looks like this:

17 8/10/01 Joe Blow    Joe@Blow.com    New York  webtherapist    www.d
+rudgereport.com    I like green-eggs and ham,etc...
[download]

That's meant to be perceived as 8 different fields, the first being the number of the entry in which I wish to sort by...descending order of course.