This is ugly, works, but ugly. I'm sure there has got to be a better way. I'm tracking all my client boxes for MS patches. This script builds an HTML table of all the MS patches and compares to number of installed clients to not installed. The patches are labeled like so: MS03-001, MS03-039, MS00-005, MS01-008, etc etc. The 3rd and 4th characters represent the years. I'm sorting the data by year from 03 - 98 for display and here's how i'm doing it. I'm also padding the installed/not installed numbers with zeros in an ugly way. Please slap me around a bit and correct my ways. 
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%pad = ('1', '000', '2', '00', '3', '0', '4', '');
@years = qw[05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98];
@keys = sort keys %AllPatches;
foreach $year (@years) {
foreach $BulletinID (@keys) {
        next if (substr($BulletinID,2,2) ne $year);
        next if ($MissingPatchList{$BulletinID}+$FoundPatchList{$Bulle
+tinID}==0);
        if ($counter == 7) {
                print HTML "</tr><tr>\n";
                $counter = 0;
        }
        $MissingPatchList{$BulletinID} = "0" if (!$MissingPatchList{$B
+ulletinID});
        $FoundPatchList{$BulletinID} = "0" if (!$FoundPatchList{$Bulle
+tinID});
        $MissingPatchList{$BulletinID} = "$pad{(length($MissingPatchLi
+st{$BulletinID}))}$MissingPatchList{$BulletinID}";
        $FoundPatchList{$BulletinID} = "$pad{(length($FoundPatchList{$
+BulletinID}))}$FoundPatchList{$BulletinID}";
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