made changes but no change in output

commented out slurp

made reable code by using @_ as used per subs

no sort and no change in message

open my $in, '<', 'numbers.txt' or die $!;

  #  local $/;    # slurp mode
    my @data = <$in>;
    chomp @data;
    close $in;

sort_num(@data);
my @new_sort=sort_num();
print "this is new sorted data ;",@new_sort;

sub sort_num{
    my @sorted=sort {$a <=> $b}@_;
   return @sorted;
    }
[download]

Argument "2 3 3 3 5 7 8 12 32 44 55 12 3 23 43 33 1 4 25 43 42 1" isn'
+t numeric in sort at C:\Users\Alberto\Documents\NetBeansProjects\Perl
+Project\Perl Essentials\subroutines\ave_mode_median_range sub.pl line
+ 24.
this is new sorted data ;
[download]

What is your data? The warning message
    Argument "2 3 3 3 5 7 8 12 32 44 55 12 3 23 43 33 1 4 25 43 42 1" isn't numeric in sort at ...
shows that Perl still thinks it's a single string with a bunch of digits and spaces in it. sort will never sort this numerically — or any other way, since it's just a single-element list and so is already "sorted"!

---

Give a man a fish:  <%-(-(-(-<

As AnomalousMonk has pointed out, the way your data is formatted is important.

The way most programmers would expect to see your data is like this:

2
3
3
3
5
7
8
12
...
[download]

If, instead, it looks like this:

2 3 3 3 5 7 8 12 ...
[download]

then you have a problem .. or rather, it needs to be handled differently in your code.

For the second case, you need:

my @data = split /\s+/,<$in>;
[download]

In addition, the way the "sort_num" is called has some issues in your code.

This is how it should be called:

 my @new_sort = sort_num (@data);
[download]

And call it only ONCE.

        "Despite my privileged upbringing, I'm actually quite well-balanced. I have a chip on both shoulders."         - John Nash

correct formatting of data is something new to me...I never thought about it once in this case of numbers vs strings but ,now, I will.

One more question

can anyone explain why I can't do slurp while populating the data var? I am aware of the memory issue that may arise if file is big but for these little programs is not an issue to me...but then again I am learning and you may have some experiences to share ;-)

 local $/;    # slurp mode

thank you all!

learning to do subs and modules now so many more new things to think about

Strongly suggest using Data::Dumper to see what your data is and looks like.