Or if you really want to try it your way... :-)

Sometimes it helps to just print out the @sorted... you would see it was a bunch of refs to arrays... so then you could just do another print $sorted[0] to see what that gave you... you would see it too was another ARRAY(0x22518c) you would get to it with either $sorted[0]->[0] or ${$sorted[0]}[0] Which is kinda hard to read IMHO...

Anyway, the other problem you had.. you were on the right track in a way.. was that your var 'c' just needed to count the number of arrays you created instead of the number of lines :)

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my @data;
my @sorted;
my ($c, $i, $j);

#open ( DATA, "<c:/my documents/npoint.txt" ) or die ("could not open 
+file. &!");

$c = 0;

# Loop while there are more lines to read
while (not eof DATA) {
    # Read four lines and store them in the @record array
    my @record = (
        scalar(<DATA>),
        scalar(<DATA>),
        scalar(<DATA>) );
    $c++;
    # Remove the new-line from the end of the lines
    chomp @record;

    # Store a reference to this @record instance
    # in the @data array.
    push @data, \ @record;
}

@sorted = sort { $a -> [1] <=> $b -> [1] } @data;

for ($i = 0; $i < $c; $i++) {
    for ($j = 0; $j <= 2; $j++) {
        printf "%4s ", $sorted[$i]->[$j] if $j==0;
      printf " %20s", $sorted[$i]->[$j] if $j>0;
      print "\n" if $j ==2;
    }
}

__DATA__
1
1229.003932
1348.475942
2
1127.677089
1628.387836
3
1830.910815
686.226114
4
2181.269057
780.242484
5
2302.996066
850.572327
6
1201.169859
1107.266903
7
1266.842105
665.334403
8
1471.475049
644.755582
9
2278.018406
1909.274463
10
2616.853057
1779.732754
11
2730.703647
1697.259759
12
1608.323892
1555.214756
13
1719.087310
1988.052650
14
1924.751609
1987.482170
[download]

Hope this helps... :-) fixed typo...

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