in reply to sorting with substrings

Update: Oh dear, this is what you get for posting first thing in the morning when you're still half-asleep. I just re-read your question and realised that the below doesn't actually give the desired output :(

Sort::Naturally will handle this job, and is certainly a much simpler solution. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Sort::Naturally;

my @unsorted = <DATA>;

my @sorted = nsort(@unsorted);

print @sorted;

__DATA__
workstation_1_1
voiceserver_1_1
workstation_1_2
voiceserver_1_2

[download]

Gives... 

voiceserver_1_1
voiceserver_1_2
workstation_1_1
workstation_1_2

[download]

Note that while this is much simpler than the other solutions, it may not necessarily be the most efficient. If you're only dealing with a relatively small dataset this probably isn't a concern. Otherwise, you might need to do some Benchmarking.

Hope this helps,
Darren :)

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom