Thanks, I'll give these a try. I guess I should have been more clear. I have several files with functions that read in the data and I left some of that code out because it would have made the posting huge. Then I placed a few samples of code I had tried to display what I could not get to work. I found a sample by by tadman that I almost got to work. Tadman's sample is below 
Re: How do you specify which fields to sort by when sorting an array.
my @output = sort { $a->[0] cmp $b->[0]
                 || $a->[3] <=> $b->[3] }
             map { chomp; [ split(',', $_, 4) ] }
             <INPUT_FILE>;

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In reply to Re: sorting and array by [2] by kevyt
in thread sorting and array by [2] by kevyt

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