in reply to problems with advanced array sort

You need to use a sorting subroutine which extracts the number that you want to sort by from the strings and sorts on that. It might look something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; print sort my_sort <DATA>; sub my_sort { my ($a_num) = $a =~ /(\d+)\.zip/; my ($b_num) = $b =~ /(\d+)\.zip/; return $a_num <=> $b_num; } __DATA__ {ID#0000D128}-20060519_090519_00000ZURACF2954.zip {ID#0000D129}-20060519_091438_00000ZURACF2955.zip {ID#0000D12C}-20060519_092458_00000ZURACF2957.zip {ID#0000D12D}-20060519_092911_00000ZURACF2956.zip

Or there's a Schwartzian Transform version:

print map { $_->[0] } sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] } map { [ $_, /(\d+)\.zip/ ] } <DATA>;

Or, if you don't care about maintainability :)

print sort { ($a =~ /(\d+)\.zip/)[0] <=> ($b =~ /(\d+)\.zip/)[0] } <DATA>;
--
<http://dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg