I would like a sort that sorts items in a more reasonable way. That is a1a should come before a10a and the releases of Linux should be in release order. release 2.6.10 should not come before 2.6.9. Also 1.55 should come before 1.6. I have a very ugly solution for this problem, but would like some better ones. I am so sure that my opinion of what is reasonable is not as reasonable as it could be. 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

our @out;
our @data;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    push @data, $_ if ($_);
}

our $srtre  = qr/^(?:(\d+(?:\.\d+)*)?|\d*)(\D*)(.*)$/;

@out = sort {
    my $x = $a;
    my $y = $b;
    my $ret = 0;

    while (!($x eq $y)) {
        my ($xx, $yy);
        my ($l, $m, $xx, $yy);

        ($l, $xx, $x) = ($x =~ $srtre);
        ($m, $yy, $y) = ($y =~ $srtre);
        if ($l eq $m) {
# the common case
            if ($ret = $xx cmp $yy) {
                last;
            }
        } else {
            if (length($l) && length($m)) {
                if ($l =~ /\d+\.\d+\.d+/ || $m =~ /\d+\.\d+\.\d+/) {
                    my @ll = split(/\./, $l);
                    my @lm = split(/\./, $m);
                    if ($#ll == $#lm) {
                        for (my $x = 0; $x <= $#ll; $x++) {
                            if ($ret = ($ll[$x] <=> $lm[$x])) {
                                last;
                            }
                        }
                    } elsif ($#ll < $#lm) {
                        for (my $x = 0; $x <= $#ll; $x++) {
                            if ($ret = ($ll[$x] <=> $lm[$x])) {
                                last;
                            }
                        }
                        $ret = -1 unless ($ret);
                    } else {
                        for (my $x = 0; $x <= $#lm; $x++) {
                            if ($ret = ($ll[$x] <=> $lm[$x])) {
                                last;
                            }
                        }
                        $ret = 1 unless ($ret);
                    }
                    last if $ret;
                } elsif ($l == $m) {
# handle leading zeros.
# don't want (00 0 000)
                    if ($xx . $x eq $yy . $y) {
                        if ($ret = ($l cmp $m)) {
                            last;
                        }
                    }
                    if ($ret = ($xx cmp $yy)) {
                            last;
                    }
                } elsif ($ret = ($l <=> $m)) {
                    last;
                }
            } else {
                if ($ret = ($l.$xx cmp $m.$yy)) {
                    last;
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return $ret;
} @data;

print join(', ', @out), "\n";

__END__
a1.5
a1.5b
a1.55
a1.55b
a1.6
a1.6b
linux-2.4.3.tar
linux-2.4.28.tar
linux-2.4.29.tar
linux-2.4.29a.tar
linux-2.10.6.tar
linux-2.10.50.tar

[download]
The DATA section is in 'my' prefered sorted order.
-- gam3
A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.

In reply to Alpha number sort by gam3

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