This works, of course, but on a long list the overhead of doing all of those hash lookups multiple times may start to effect performance.

This would, therefore, be a great time to try out a Schwartzian Transform - which would look something like this:

my @l = ({FN => 'Les', LN => 'Howard'},
     {FN => 'Larry', LN => 'Wall'},
     {FN => 'Randal', LN => 'Schwartz'});

my @sorted = map { $_->[2] }
             sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] || $a->[0] cmp $b->[0] }
             map { [$_->{FN}, $_->{LN}, $_] } @l;

foreach (@sorted) {
    print "$_->{LN}, $_->{FN}\n";
}
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--
http://www.dave.org.uk

European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000
http://www.yapc.org/Europe/