I'm not clear I understand what you want. You say you want to "sort two different arrays together", when it seems (from your code) what you want is to sort the array by two different criteria.

What you get now in @maxtemp are two sorted copies of your @alldata array, first by the first element of the anonymous array referenced by the 'data' key of the anonymous hash, and second by the second element of that anonymous array (oy!).

Do you want to get a list that's ordered by the first element and have 'ties' be sorted by the second element? That looks like

my @maxtemp = sort { $b->{data}[0] <=> $a->{data}[0] or
            $b->{data}[1] <=> $a->{data}[1] } @alldata;
[download]

Deep-nested data structures are pretty complex stuff to be tackling for a self-described 'newbie' =) good on ya!

HTH

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

Close.. What I actually want to do is sort the 1st and 2nd values together, and then retrieve them in descending order. Effectively "flattening" two of the array values together (for this project, the third and fourth values are irrelevant). I'm thinking maybe something like this (does this make sense? I'm not sure what the first line will give me exactly...):

@newarray = (@alldata{data}[0], @alldata{data}[1])
@maxref = sort { $b->{data} <=> $a->{data} } @newarray
[download]

am I getting closer?

PS: I think my newbie status combined with this 3-dimensional array/hash/array structure has caused my cerebral cortex to rupture and leak my sanity out into the aether. :-P


---

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OK, for those onlookers: After extensive conversation in the chatterbox, Clownburner told me the following:

{name} and {data} arrays map 1:1 onto each other, and the first two elements of the {data} array correspond to input and output rates, while the first two elements of the {name} array correspond to filenames.

Clownburner wants a list of filenames sorted by greatest rates (input or output).

First, get the list of name-value pairs for the first two values of {data} from @alldata

my @names_and_rates = map { [ $_->{name}[0], $_->{data}[0] ],
                [ $_->{name}[1], $_->{data}[1] ] } 
            @alldata;
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Now what you've got is an array, each element of which is an anonymous array consisting of a name -> rate pair. i.e.:

@names_and_rates = ( [ name1, rate1],
            [name2, rate2],
            ...
            );
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What you want to do is sort that array by the second element of each anonymous array, i.e.

my @final_list = sort { $b->[1] <=> $a->[1] } @names_and_rates;
# $b first for descending order
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I think that will get you what you want. You can, of course, combine the two statements into one, e.g.

my @final_list = sort { #sort stuff } map { #map stuff } @alldata;
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but I think that might be confusing if you come back to this code later, especially given the farrago of syntax. YMMV, IANAProfessional, etc.

I hope this is right and that it helps.

a nicety : if you want to print out the top n, do this:

print "File\t\tRate\n";

foreach (@final_list[0 .. $n-1] ) {
    print $_->[0], "\t\t", $_->[1], "\n";
}
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Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

Especially it's suggestion to use the debugger.
Roughly:

> perl -dw prog.pl

Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl

Enter h or `h h' for help.

main::(prog.pl:3):    my $firstline;

  DB<1> c 123

main::(prog.pl:123):    %hololoh # has just been loaded w/ first value
+s

  DB<1> x %hololoh

0  HASH(0x3e5e54)
...
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It's much easier when you can actually look at it with some initial values. (It even makes it easier to get your debugging print statements right.)

p