Addressing your points:

• It changes the order of the rows. : Yes - it SORTS them. No change if they are already sorted.
• It drops a value from the first row.: Agreed - I found and fixed this bug this AM (original post was late at night)
• (Minor) It splits on spaces, not tabs.: Correction - it splits on WHITESPACE, that includes tab.

I agree - it is not the easiest code to read, but I think it is more data-tolerant than yours, which complains under "use warnings", if the data contains blank lines (which are present in the OP).

Regarding efficiency - sorting a million pre-sorted records takes less than a second, on modern computers, so I don't see an issue.

I do appreciate your critique, and enjoy the discussion, but, at times, i have a low threshold for responding to nits, so I apologize in advance if I appear to be un-responsive. to subsequent posts.

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