Perl has a very nice built in sort operator; it's almost always better to use that than a homerolled one.

In this case, I offer two suggestions; first, use sort's ability for any sort specification to sort by the fields in the order that you want; and second, to sort using the indices instead of elements, then using one addition loop to move things into place if you are starting with separate arrays.

# @date, @provider, @description, and @page are defined 
# elsewhere.

my @indices = sort { $date[$a] <=> $date[$b] ||
                     $provider[$a] cmp $provider[$b] ||
                     $description[$a] cmp $description[$b] ||
                     $exhibit[$a] cmp $exhibit[$b] ||
                     $page[$a] <=> $page[$b] } 
              (0..$#date);

@date = map { $date[ $_ ] } @indices;
@provider = map { $date[ $_ ] } @indices;
# etc etc...
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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain