A useful technique is to create a "sorter factory", which will create a new sub which remembers the sort parameters, then return that sub to be used by sort. In Perl parlance, this is called storing the parameters in a lexical variable and creating a sub which closes around that lexical. For example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use Data::Dumper;


my @xx = ( 'dfb|cy|nmju', 'dfb|my|jhiho', 'aaa|zz|gggg' );
my $sorter =  make_sorter(2);
my @sorted_xx = sort $sorter @xx;

print Dumper \@xx;
print Dumper \@sorted_xx;

sub make_sorter
{
  my($col)=@_;
  return sub {
    my @arr_a = split /\|/, $a;
    my @arr_b = split /\|/, $b;
    return $arr_a[$col] cmp $arr_b[$col];
  };
}
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