Or why even bother reading the file contents into an array?

#!/usr/bin/perl -wd

open( FILE, "file.dat" ) ||
        die "Cannot Open file ($!)\n";
my @output =  map { $_->[0] }
              sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
              map { [$_, (split(/\|/,$_))[1]] }
              <FILE>;

close( FILE );

print @output, "\n";
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-derby