neversaint,
You should never resort to sorting to find the max or min value of a list unless the side effect of sorting has a benefit later on. Use a high or low water mark algorithm. Corion has suggested a fine one that, when possible, uses a C implementation that makes it really fast. Unfortunately - it doesn't completely answer your question since it only gives you the max value and not which hash it came from.

I question why you have 4 distinct hashes if each one only contains a single key. It seems to make more sense to have a single level hash or if absolutely necessary - a hash of hashes (HoH). For the moment, I will concede that there may be some valid, yet unspoken, reason to have things the way you do. 

use List::Util 'max';
my @h_refs = ($hash_w, $hash_x, $hash_y, $hash_z);
my ($max, $max_i);
for ( 0 .. $#h_refs ) {
    my $max_v = max values %{ $h_refs[$_] };
    if ( ! defined $max || $max_v > $max ) {
        ($max, $max_i) = ($max_v, $_);
    }
}
print "The max value is $max\n";
print "It is in the hash referenced by index $max_i\n";

[download]

Cheers - L~R

After re-reading the question for the 3rd time, I am not sure "which hash" is actually part of the question and was just an innoculous comment - *shrug*

In reply to Re: Getting Max Value from Different Hashes by Limbic~Region
in thread Getting Max Value from Different Hashes by neversaint

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