I would do this in such a way:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $bit="ace"; my (%hash);
while (<DATA>)
{
  while($_ =~ /$bit/g)
  {
    $hash{$_}++;
  }
}
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And then you can put it into an array, where on position i is a reference to array of lines having i occurences of $bit:

my $bit="ace"; my (%hash, @rank);
while (<DATA>)
{
  while($_ =~ /$bit/g)
  {
    $hash{$_}++;
  }
  push @{$rank[$hash{$_}]}, $_;
}

# see how the structure looks like
# use Data::Dumper;
# print Dumper \@rank;

for(@rank)
{
  for(@$_)
  {
    print;
  }
}
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