It seems to me that you want to do this in a perlish way, and that is why you are trying to do it with a foreach loop. However, foreach (@entries) is the wrong type of loop to use for sorting @entries. It can be done, but you're trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. Why? foreach goes through each element of an array, but it doesn't tell you where in the array the elements are located. A sorting routine, by its nature, needs to have at least some information about the location in the array of the elements it's comparing.

It's a good idea to use correct names for your variables, lest you confuse yourself. The loop variable in a foreach loop is not a counter, unless the array you're iterating over happens to be a counting sequence.