Thank's, that worked well, except it doesn't display the last names alphabetically... I'm not quite sure what the problem is--I think it may have to do something with the keys being numbers, and we are telling it to sort by them. This is my first time using associatve arrays, so bare with me :P...anyway here's the new code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

use strict;

open(TEST, 'test.txt') || die "Couldn't open it";
print "\nFile Opened\n\n\n";
my $i=1;
my %list;
while(<TEST>){
    chomp;
    /(\w+)\s+(\w+)/;
    print "$i : $2\,$1\n";
    $list{$i} = [$1,$2];
    $i+=1;
}

foreach my $c (sort keys %list) {
    print "$list{$c}->[1],$list{$c}->[0]$/"}



close(TEST);
die "\n\n\nFile Closed\n";
[download]

Input file:

Emmitt Smith
Walter Payton
Barry Sanders
Jim Brown
Jeremy Smith

Oh yeah, what do you mean by dereferencing?

Thanks,
Emmitt

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