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"!