in reply to manipulating array

Probably you don't want grep, but instead map and a regular expression substitution (see perlretut and perlre):

use strict; use warnings; my @call = ( 'A19284 hostname 07/09/07 moredata moredata', 'A19384 hostname 06/09/07 moredata moredata', 'A19234 hostname 07/08/07 moredata moredata', ); my @callClean = map {$_->[1]} sort {$a->[0] cmp $b->[0]} map {[(join '', @{[split '/', $_->[0]]}[2, 1, 0]), $_->[1]]} map {m|^\w+\s+(.*?(\d+/\d+/\d+).*)|; [$2, $1]} @call; print "$_\n" for @call; print "$_\n" for @callClean;

Prints:

A19284 hostname 05/09/07 moredata moredata A19384 hostname 06/09/07 moredata moredata A19234 hostname 08/08/07 moredata moredata hostname 08/08/07 moredata moredata hostname 05/09/07 moredata moredata hostname 06/09/07 moredata moredata

Update: sort by the dates too.


DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel