Cool! Besides the solution you were shown involving adding one to the index before you print it, you could also use unshift to pad the array and work with its true index:

my @vdbhosts = sort @lines;
unshift @vdbhosts, 'padding';

my $count = 0;
for ( @vdbhosts ) {
    my $host = $vdbhosts[ $count ];
    print "$count: $host\n" unless $host eq 'padding';
    $count++;
}
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Edit: added alternative solution example, my original reply didn't add much ;-)

Getting there. Actually working of the suggestion provided by hippo. Making progress. Thanks for your suggestion as well.

Add an unused entry to the front of the array, then indexes will align with the data in the way you want.

Here's a partial example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=1143022

use strict;
use warnings;

my @names = qw( aaa bbbb ccccc dddd ee fffff gggg hhhhhh );

# add unused item to front to align names with indexes

unshift @names, 'unused';

for my $index (1 .. $#names)
  {
  printf "%2d %s\n", $index, $names[$index];
  }
print "\nselect desired by number:\n";
my $in = <STDIN>;

# validate input

chomp $in;
$in =~ /^[\d,\s]+$/ or die "$in is an invalid input";

for my $index ($in =~ /\d+/g )
  {
  if( $index >= 1 and $index <= $#names )
    {
    print "selected $names[$index]\n";
    }
  else
    {
    die "$index is outside the allowable range\n";
    }
  }
[download]

This is perl. Why try to cope with "off by one" (add 1 or subtract 1?) if you don't have to? :)