++ for a very informative answer. Have just been playing with Sort::Maker that will return a sub reference encapsulating any of the four types of sorting routines you ably demonstrated above. While it's not much savings for the plain case, you can alter your choice by changing one keyword:

use Sort::Maker;
print make_sorter(qw/plain string substr($_,10)/)->(<DATA>);

__DATA__
RRsnap02  2013-07-24 12:35:35
vmk000    2013-07-22 17:16:50
vmk001    2013-07-22 20:00:36
vmk009    2013-07-23 18:21:12
vmk010    2013-07-23 18:31:00
vmk020    2013-07-23 23:30:43
vmk024    2013-07-24 03:27:30
vmk031    2013-07-24 10:27:36
vmk032    2013-07-24 11:27:38
vmk032    2013-07-24 11:27:38
[download]

The generated code is straight forward:

sort {
    do{
        my( $left, $right ) = map { substr($_,10) } $a, $b;
    $left cmp $right
    }
} @_;
[download]

You could replace 'plain' with 'orcish', 'ST', or 'GRT' -- and for the ST case, the generated code is:

return  map $_->[0],
    sort {$a->[1] cmp $b->[1]}
    map [ $_,
        do{ my ($val) = substr($_,10) ; $val }
    ], @_  ;
[download]