This is a fairly complex task for a "total noob." You need to know how to:

• Open files for reading and writing
• Read a file line-by-line
• Parse values from a line by one method or another
• Insert values based on what's there
• Sort values
• Print out the sorted and changed values

All those topics would be scattered through several chapters of any book on learning Perl, so don't feel bad if you struggle with it for a while. Start at the top of the list and work your way down: learn how to read and write files, how to loop through a file line-by-line, and so on, and you'll get there.

Just for fun, here's a one-liner solution that leverages the Unix sort utility so I don't have to do it in Perl. When you can figure out what this is doing, you won't be a noob anymore.

$ cat 1124577.txt
Black, Joe 0987

Smith, Sue 0534

Brown, Andy 587-0986
Galt, John (212)-555-1212

$ perl -ne 'print if s|^(.*\S)\s+(\(\d\d\d\)-)?(\d\d\d-)?(\d\d\d\d)|$1
+ . " " . ($2?$2:"(333)-") . ($3?$3:"321-") . $4|e' 1124577.txt | sort
Black, Joe (333)-321-0987
Brown, Andy (333)-587-0986
Galt, John (212)-555-1212
Smith, Sue (333)-321-0534
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