Many many thanks, especially to Merlyn for the simple solution as reply #3 in this thread. I have used this and it works a treat.

I had wondered how you could extract the indices from a perl sort operation but could see a simple way to do it. My real example had 5 linked arrays and using Merlyns method does the job in 6 lines of code. It is in a user interface function, so I was not bothered about performance.

To all who suggested I use a Hash structure, I know that would probably have been right, but generating the simple linked arrays was easy from the previous data, but the hash would have been (a little) more tricky.

The actual application was building an AoA for GD::Graph

Once again, thankyou to all for your ideas and time

Andy