To expand on ant9000's answer, his function will help in making a comparison tag. He's building a string which has all the numbers in fixed-width columns so that the string comparison operator will naturally order according to numerical fields. To use it to sort by those tags, you'd apply the schwartzian transform:

my @keys_sorted_by_converted_value =
       map { $_->[0] }
       sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
       map { [ $_, fmt($hash{$_}) ] }
       keys %hash;
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--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

You're right: reading again my post, I find it quite cryptic myself... sorry.
The idea is the following:


@sorted_keys=sort
 { fmt($hash{$a}->{oid}) <=> fmt($hash{$b}->{oid}) }
 keys %hash;
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where fmt is defined as above (with the correction in split below, sure!). You can also use cmp instead of <=>, if you wish.

my $foo = fmt($oid);
print "FOO: $foo\n";

sub fmt($){
    join("", map { sprintf "%05d", $_ } split(/./, shift));
}
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Just a wild guess, but I don't think split /./ is going to do what you want. I think you want split /\./ (note the \, escaping the "match anything" .)
--
Mike

Sure, my fault: the split should be on /\./.