If you only want the min and max of a list of strings, sorting is not very efficient. Check out List::Util, which has a nice minstr and maxstr function. If you want to make only one pass, you can use the C-coded reduce from there, and still get some decent speed:

use List::Util qw(reduce);
my $min_max = reduce {
  my ($min, $max) = ref $a ? @$a : ($a, $a);
  $min = $b if $min gt $b;
  $max = $b if $max lt $b;
  [$min, $max];
} @your_list_here;
my($min, $max) = @$min_max;
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker