I thought I'd previously found a way of using "local" to get around this but I can't reconstruct it now.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;


my @arr1 = ( 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 6 );
my @arr2;

local $a = 'whatever';

{
    @arr2 = sort { $a <=> $b } @arr1;
}

print join( ' ', @arr2 ), "\n";
[download]

hth,
PooLpi