There is a vast difference between "random" and "meets some ordering criteria". If you have a constraint on the ordering that you want to meet (if possible, it may not be possible of course) you really need to tell us what that constraint is. Telling us about the bigger picture is often useful too so long as it makes the reason for the constraint clear - I can't imagine why somewhat random ordering is important in the context of a firewall.

I'm having trouble judging your coding ability so I didn't ease up on the sample code. However you should ask about anything that doesn't make sense to you - we are about helping you learn after all, so if you understood everything your scope for learning is fairly limited!

Here is one hint: pickEm is recursive and so, effectively, is %ips.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.