There's a simple, quadratic, solution: repeatedly find the smallest key that hasn't gotten a value yet. Give it the next value.

But I would go a different way: write all the keys to a file, one key per line. Call sort(1). Read the sorted file. Assign $. to each value.

And I'd look into finding the sort order at the moment you're creating the huge hash.

In reply to Re: In-place sort with order assignment by JavaFan
in thread In-place sort with order assignment by BrowserUk

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