Although it is unclear (to me) whether this will solve your problem, here is a codelet for the sorting issue:
use strict;

my @aa = qw/1245 1248 0000 1246 1247/;
my @c;
my %bb;

my $cnt = -1;
foreach my $tim (@aa) {
    ++$cnt;
    $bb{$cnt}{'time'}  = $tim;
    if ($tim == 0000) {
        for my $next_non_zero ($cnt + 1 .. scalar (@aa) -1) {
            next if ($aa[$next_non_zero] == 0000);
            $bb{$cnt}{'order'} = $aa[$next_non_zero];
            last;
        }
        if (! $bb{$cnt}{'order'}) {
            for my $last_non_zero (reverse 0 .. $cnt - 1) {
                next if ($aa[$last_non_zero] == 0000);
                $bb{$cnt}{'order'} = $aa[$last_non_zero];
                last;
            }
        }
        if (! $bb{$cnt}{'order'}) {
            $bb{$cnt}{'order'} = 0000;
        }
    }
    else {
        $bb{$cnt}{'order'} = $tim;
    }
}

foreach my $key ( sort {
                        $bb{$a}{'order'} <=> $bb{$b}{'order'}
                        ||
                        $bb{$a}{'time'} <=> $bb{$b}{'time'}
                       } keys %bb ) {
    push @c, $bb{$key}{'time'};
}

  
print "@aa\n";
print "@c\n";

__DATA__
1245 1248 0000 1246 1247
__OUTPUT__
1245 0000 1246 1247 1248
or
__DATA__
1245 1248 0000 1246 1247 0000
__OUTPUT__
1245 0000 1246 0000 1247 1248

[download]

pelagic

In reply to Re: Exceptional sorting by pelagic
in thread Exceptional sorting by PerlingTheUK

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