Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!ccount
From: ccount@athena.mit.edu (Craig A Counterman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: sort
Summary: Is this possible?
Keywords: sort
Message-ID: <1990Feb1.050145.21183@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 1 Feb 90 05:01:45 GMT
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Reply-To: ccount@athena.mit.edu (Craig A Counterman)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 17

I am a convert to perl, thanks to the Perl Reference Guide, and a2p
and s2p.  I used the programs to convert a series of awk and sed
scripts to perl, and the ref. card to understand the code and fine
tune the result.  It works great.

One thing I'd like to do but don't yet see how (if it's possible), is
to sort the lines of a file based on a given field.  My actual
application would be a bit more complex, but that's the basic idea.

sort() would sort a single array, but I think I need it to also
generate an index array I could then use to reference the other arrays.
(I'd read and split each line in the file into a series of arrays, one
column per array and visa versa, do some processing, and then want to
sort on one of the arrays).

Thanks,
Craig