Here is yet another way to accomplish the task. Hopefully I understood your question and this gets you your expected results.

update: this just accomplishes the sorting 
use strict;
use warnings;

print map { $_->[0] . "\n"; } sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] } map { chomp
+; [$_, /\d+\s+([a-zA-Z]+)/]; } <DATA>;

__DATA__
1 Charlie
1 Edward
2 Bob
2 Alfred
3 Barry

[download]

In reply to Re: How to sort? by ercparker
in thread How to sort? by redss

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