In the program below, I first read the main file into a hash of arrays with ID as the lookup key, and then I merge the total points in the sort file into the hash based on the ID's. A simple sort to get the sorted array of ID's, and then finally print the main data in sorted order.
use strict;
use IO::File;

# load main file
my %main_data;
my $f = new IO::File "mainfile.txt", "r" or die "Can't open main db: $
+!";
while(<$f>) {
  chomp;
  my @res = split /\t/;
  $main_data{$res[2]}{data} = \@res; # 3rd field is the ID number
}
undef $f;

# load sort reference file
my $f = new IO::File "sort.txt", "r" or die "Can't open sort.txt: $!";
while (<$f>) {
  chomp;
  my ($id, $total) = split /\t/;
  if (exists $main_data{$id}) {
    $main_data{$id}{total} = $total; # insert additional values
  }
}

# sort the main db in descending order
my @sorted_id = sort { $main_data{$b}{total} <=>
                       $main_data{$a}{total} } keys %main_data;

# print sorted main db
print "@{$main_data{$_}{data}}\n" foreach @sorted_id;

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I have created the following simplified test data, note that as long as the 3rd field is the lookup id, it doesn't matter how many fields are in the main db.

mainfile.txt
------------
A       B       12
C       D       11
E       F       10

sort.txt
--------
10      120.00
11      200.00

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Note that I deliberately left out ID:12 to demonstrate the sort of undef values. The output result is:
C D 11
E F 10
A B 12

[download]
Note that ID:12 appears at the end, because 'undef' is less than defined values.

In reply to Re: sorting an array from two sources by Roger
in thread sorting an array from two sources by Anonymous Monk

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