in reply to complex sort

"Use a nested hash", I thought. It's one of those thoughts that sounds like it offers a neater solution than it does. This does the job, but it's a little contrived. Having said that, once you've got the stuff into the data structure you may find there are lots of other great things you can do with it, so there may be some merit here that I haven't spotted. See how you like:
my %sort; for (<DATA>) { m!(\d+)(\D+)(\d+)(\D*)R(\d+)B?(\d*)\.(\w+)$!; $sort{$7}{$6}{"$1$2"}{$3}{$5}{$4} = $_; } for my $first (sort keys %sort) { for my $second (reverse keys %{$sort{$first}}) { for my $third (sort keys %{$sort{$first}{$second}}) { for my $fourth (sort keys %{$sort{$first}{$second}{$third} +}) { for my $fifth (sort keys %{$sort{$first}{$second}{$thi +rd}{$fourth}}) { for my $sixth (sort keys %{$sort{$first}{$second}{ +$third}{$fourth}{$fifth}}) { print $sort{$first}{$second}{$third}{$fourth}{ +$fifth}{$sixth}; } } } } } }
This prints out
18AD13XR0B3.ras 18DD13AR0B2.ras 5A344R2B15.ras 13B29AR0B1.ras 113A22R1.ras 113A29R0.ras 113A29AR0.ras 113B28R2.ras 5A32R0.ras 5A33R0.ras 5A34R0.ras 5A35R0.ras 5A35SR0.ras 18AD13XR0B3.vec 18DD12YR0B2.vec 18DD13AR0B2.vec 5A344R2B15.vec 113B29AR0B1.vec 113A22R1.vec 113A28R0.vec 113A28AR0.vec 113A28R1.vec 113A28R2.vec 113A28AR2.vec 113A29R1.vec 113A29AR2.vec 5A32R0.vec 5A33R0.vec 5A34R0.vec 5A35R0.vec
... if that's not exactly what you wanted, you can probably tweak the code. And maybe some greater monk than I can make the recursive unpacking of the hash a bit shorter.

Merry Christmas!

§ George Sherston