Ooooh! CUSIPS! I worked at RiskMetrics for several months, so I know about these. Fun stuff. Anyway, you might want to look at my Resorting to Sorting tutorial. That should help you set up a sorting routine. You shouldn't need a Schwartzian Transform, but merely a multi-tiered sort() block.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who could use a job
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;