I'm not sure I understand your goal. You seem to be printing a sequence of structured "paragraphs", like: 
Report on remote host: (some.host)
pid: (some pid)
    some socket statistics
    some more socket statistics
    ...
pid: (some other pid)
    still more socket statistics
    had enough socket statistics?
...
Report on remote host: (another.host)
pid: (yet another pid)
    ...
...

[download]
Now, are you supposed to be sorting according to the "cnt" value within each "pid" paragraph? Or are you supposed to sort the pid paragraphs within a given "rip" section according to which pid has the highest "cnt" value? Or are you supposed to sort the "Remote host" sections according to which one has the highest "cnt" value?

Or maybe you don't really want the output to be structured that way? If you want each "rip/pid/socktype" ordered according to its respective "cnt" value (that is, it's okay that various lines for "rip X" are interleaved with lines for "rip Y" because of their "cnt" rankings), then you just come up with a suitable report line format that keeps all the information together on each line, use your loop to "sprintf()" each report line onto an array, then sort the array before you print it.

Once you clarify what you're trying to do, the answer should come pretty quickly.

(updated to fix grammar)

In reply to Re: Trouble sorting a nested HOH by graff
in thread Trouble sorting a nested HOH by mielstogo

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