to stay on topic, here a (in my opinion) beautiful answer:

use strict;
use Tie::File;

my @array;
tie @array, 'Tie::File', 'test.data';
@array = sort {(split / /, $a)[1] cmp (split / /, $b)[1]} @array;
untie @array;
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because of the way sort works there are _some_ more split calls, but it should work fine for short files. perhaps caching the once split person names boosts this a little bit. i noticed that using Devel::DProf breaks the code in some way?! is there a known issue?