I prefer a line-by-line approach and create a new array each time a line starting with a number is encountered. I assume that the data fits into memory, otherwise sorting will be difficult: 

use strict;
use warnings;

my @lines;
while(<DATA>){
        push @lines, [$1] if /^(\d+)/;
        push @{$lines[-1]}, $_;
}
print @$_[1..@$_-1] for sort { $a->[0] <=> $b->[0] } @lines;

__DATA__
2 [...]
  [line1]
  [line2]
  [line3]
3 [...]
  [line1]
1 [...]
  [line1]
  [line2]
2 [...]
  [line1]
  [line2]

[download]
Update: @lines should really be called @blocks

In reply to Re: Looking for elegance by hdb
in thread Looking for elegance by monkprentice

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