I am rethinking whether I need the while and foreach so I have changed it to :

open (FOO, ">$scratches") || die "could not open file:$!";
        open (D, "$logf") || die "could not open file:$!";

         while (<D>) {

                ## look for 9840S and ebexpire
                ## declare OFS = tab
                ## tell split to split on IRS 0, 1 & 5. Very similar t
+o awk print $

                if (($_ =~ /9840S/) && ($_ =~ /ebexpire, ebexpire/ )) 
+{
                        local $, = "\t";
                        print F00 +(split)[0,1,5], $/;
                        print FOO (sort { $a <=> $b } $_ );

                } # end if
        } # end while

        close (FOO);
        close (D);
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I am probably making this too hard, but I want to numerically sort the 3rd field. How do I combine the print FOO statements so that I am still spliting fields 0,1,5 while sorting on field 5? thank you,