Waah! Mommy, the bad man hurt my eyes. ;-)

First, don't use parallel arrays. That is so Perl4. Make a nice array of arrays, probably like this:

($placeholder, $page, $date, ...) = split;
push @raw, [ $placeholder, $page, $date ... ];
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Look at data structures cookbook for more.

Second, a monstrously efficient quicksort is built in to Perl. @sorted = sort { $a->[2] cmp $b->[2] } @raw;(Assuming $date is element 2 of the array, as outlined in the first example.) Et voila.

HTH