Thinking about it further, read a chunk of your database then sort and print to two temporary files, one for letters, one for numbers. Then the sort/merge of the temporary files will be simpler keeping the two categories separate. Finally you can concatenate the letters and numbers merged files for your results file. In this code I am writing to in-memory scalars rather than disk files just to keep things tidy.

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
> my @values = qw{
>    041351920234
>    Rabbit
>    0343120
>    041271024500
>    0430870
>    Apple
>    041460301399
>    };
>  
> my $rsLets = do { \ my $lets };
> open my $letsFH, q{>}, $rsLets or die $!;
> my $rsNums = do { \ my $nums };
> open my $numsFH, q{>}, $rsNums or die $!;
> 
> say { $_->[ 1 ] ? $numsFH : $letsFH } $_->[ 0 ] for
>    sort {
>         ( $a->[ 1 ] <=> $b->[ 1 ] )
>         ||
>         (
>         $a->[ 1 ]
>         ? $a->[ 0 ] <=> $b->[ 0 ]
>         : $a->[ 0 ] cmp $b->[ 0 ]
>         )
>         }
>    map  { [ $_, m{^\d} ? 1 : 0 ] }
>    @values;
> 
> say ${ $rsLets }, q{-----------------};
> say ${ $rsNums }, q{-----------------};'
Apple
Rabbit
-----------------
0343120
0430870
041271024500
041351920234
041460301399
-----------------
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$

[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re^3: Sorting Numbers & Text by johngg
in thread Sorting Numbers & Text by PriNet

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