in reply to a sort question

Just enhance the sort to work on arrays, something like this would do it:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict;use warnings; sub versionsort { my ($a,$b) = @_; my $diff; foreach (0..$#$a) { return 1 if !defined $b->[$_]; $diff = $a->[$_] <=> $b->[$_]; return $diff if $diff; } return @$a <=> @$b; } my @data = qw(1.1 11.2.3 2.3 11.2.1 11.2 11.2.1.1); print "before: ".join(', ',@data)."\n"; my @versions = map { [split '\.',$_] } @data; my @sorted = map { join '.',@$_} sort {versionsort($a,$b)} @versions; print "sorted: ".join(', ',@sorted)."\n";
Outputs:
before: 1.1, 11.2.3, 2.3, 11.2.1, 11.2, 11.2.1.1 sorted: 1.1, 2.3, 11.2, 11.2.1, 11.2.1.1, 11.2.3