Expressed like that you don't need a hash, referenced or otherwise. There must be more to the problem than you have expressed. You should show us the code that you have so far so that we know how to advise you in the context of what you actually want to achieve.

For the problam as expressed something like:

my @array = <DATA>;
print join "", sort @array;
[download]

would do the trick, but has obvious problems as a general solution.