I don't want to actually sort the references, I want to keep the references close to the sort key.

Based on your splendid advice, I have created this small example to show what I meant. Imagine, that the structures contain tons of data, not just ip and host. One would not want to encode the whole thing using Dumper, etc.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Data::Dumper;
use strict;

my @data =  (
          {
            'ip' => '10.0.0.10',
            'host' => 'laptop'
          },
          {
            'ip' => '10.0.0.1',
            'host' => 'router'
          },
          {
            'ip' => '10.0.0.3',
            'host' => 'desktop'
          }
        );

my %refs;

@refs{map { pack('N',$_) } @data} = @data; # cache references

my @sorted = map { $refs{substr($_,4)} } 
             sort 
             map { pack('C4N',split('\.',$_->{'ip'}), $_) }
             @data;

print Dumper(\@sorted);
[download]

Output:

$VAR1 = [
          {
            'ip' => '10.0.0.1',
            'host' => 'router'
          },
          {
            'ip' => '10.0.0.3',
            'host' => 'desktop'
          },
          {
            'ip' => '10.0.0.10',
            'host' => 'laptop'
          }
        ];
[download]

Comments would be appreciated.

Update: changed regexp for split

--
Brother Marvell

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