Normally, we recommend reading files and dealing with them line-by-line. That doesn't really work for sorting. So just read your text file into @ips, chomping as appropriate, and then sort as above. All I was helping you with was the sorting of ip octets, not the reading of a file or writing to a file. Those are left as an excersise for the reader. (I never knew how much fun it was to say that until I left university... :-})