Well, create a data structure and THEN sort it:

# fully qualified open call:
open my $orgdb , '<' , $database
     or die "$database open error: $!";

my @odb = map { chomp; [ split /\|/,$_ ] } <$orgdb>;

close $orgdb;

for( sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] } @odb ){
  printf "A: %s B(sorted): %s C: %s\n",@$_
}
[download]

See `perldoc perllol` and of course `perldoc -f ?`, where ? is first 'map', later 'chomp' and finally 'open'.

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