For production use, you might as well use Sort::Fields or Text::CSV as pointed out by merlyn.

But if your purpose is learning, apart from the other solutions mentioned in this thread, you may want to take a look at the following. The line with the assignment to @sorted_lines is called a Schwartzian Transform and is named after its inventor, merlyn himself. For good discussions and descriptions of how this works, see:

• Schwartzian Transform (merlyn)
• Schwartzian Transform (chromatic)
• Schwartzian Transform vs. plain Perl
• How do I sort an array by (anything)?
• Complex sorting

And the code is:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use vars qw($field @lines @sorted_lines);

$field=shift @ARGV;

@lines=<>;

# This is the Schwartzian transform
@sorted_lines=
        map { $_->[0] }
        sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
        map { [$_, (split(/,\s*/, $_))[$field] ] }
        @lines;

print @sorted_lines;
[download]

Once you fully understand the Schwartzian Transform, you'll be on your way to enlightenment :-)

--ZZamboni

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.