Calling srand more than once is not recommended, but that doesn't mean the results are always bad. It depends a bit on the needs of the rest of the program, but you might be able to call srand with a known seed just before you sort, and after the sort, you call srand without an argument.

But there's a totally different approach. If you need to shuffle an array using the same permutation multiple times, instead of playing games by seeding a PRN generator with the same seed, you could just shuffle the numbers 0 .. $#array and remember them (say, in an array @perm_indices). Then, if you need to shuffle an array again, you do:

    @shuffled = @array [@perm_indices];
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You may be able to use the Memoize module to this storing for you.

Abigail