Your differing potential sort requirements make this sound like a problem that could be usefully approached by means of a database. Perl has lots of nifty ways to access information stored in databases, and even to treat simple files as databases. I know it sounds like learning yet another technology, but databases are pretty straightforward and easy to talk to. You could look at the DBI modules, for starters.

BCE
--Your punctuation skills are insufficient!

In reply to Database? by BorgCopyeditor
in thread Sorting big text lists by Infinity

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