The sort I wrote was written to match the OP's spec: to sort by columns 1, 2 then 4 (which I took to mean 0, 1 and 3 in Perl terms)

Note that I updated my node a couple of hours before you posted :(

FunkyMonk - in your code, "@_" inside the sort is probably not what you think it is - at that point, @_ is still the parameter passed into "sortsub". Inside the sort itself, you only have $a and $b. The "@_" comes from the outer sub.

That's exactly what I intended

update: much less than a couple of hours:(