in reply to sort based on column values

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; sub sortby_multiplecolumn { my ($val1, $val2, $val3, $val4, $val5, $val6, $val7, $val8, $val9) + = split(" ",$a); my ($val11, $val12, $val13, $val14, $val15, $val16, $val17, $val18 +, $val19) = split(" ",$b); $val9 <=> $val19; } print $_ foreach (sort sortby_multiplecolumn <STDIN>);

You will get what you want. Here I used space as a delimiter. You can use tab as delimiter or use '\s'.