There is no shame in posting code (we were all Perl newbies once). We can't know what is wrong (and hence why it won't work) without seeing some code.

I don't understand what you mean by shuffling based on first field, a random shuffle is a random shuffle. Anyhow, here is some code to help you get started (the code for the shuffle is the same as in the docs (ie. perldoc -q random):

use strict;
use warnings;

my @array = <DATA>;
fisher_yates_shuffle(\@array);
print @array;


sub fisher_yates_shuffle {
    my $deck = shift;  # $deck is a reference to an ar
    my $i = @$deck;
    while ($i--) {
        my $j = int rand ($i+1);
        @$deck[$i,$j] = @$deck[$j,$i];
    }
}

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-enlil