You didn't show how you tried my suggestions, so I'm not sure why it didn't work for you. Here's a more complete example, which takes your sample input and sorts it by the frequencies (largest to smallest), outputting with a header built to your latest spec. Make sure you understand what's going on in the sort {block}: what $tags{$a} means, for instance. I'm sorting on the values, not the keys. The keys go into $a and $b, and I'm using those as keys into the hash to sort on the values.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my %tags;                     # hash to store tags/freqs
while(<DATA>){
    chomp;
    my($tag, $freq) = split;  # split the line on whitespace
    $tags{$tag} = $freq;      # save the tag and freq in the hash
}

# sort the hash numerically on its values, descending
for my $tag ( sort { $tags{$b} <=> $tags{$a} } keys %tags ){
    my $freq = $tags{$tag};           # put the freq for $tag in $freq
    my $header = make_header($tag, $freq);  # make the header
    print ">$header\t$tag\t$freq\n";        # print it out
}

sub make_header {
    my $tag = shift;     # get parameters
    my $freq = shift;
    my $r = int(rand(500000));     # pick a random number
    return "HWTI_${freq}_$r$tag";  # build the header
}

#input data
__DATA__
CCCDEDFFFES      45
EEBBBBGGGBB    1700
BBBCDDERFGG     850

[download]
#output
>HWTI_1700_494932EEBBBBGGGBB    EEBBBBGGGBB     1700
>HWTI_850_10814BBBCDDERFGG      BBBCDDERFGG     850
>HWTI_45_187939CCCDEDFFFES      CCCDEDFFFES     45

[download]

In reply to Re^3: Sorting issue by aaron_baugher
in thread Sorting issue by bluray

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