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in reply to Sort on Number Embedded in String

Wow, lots of replies, glad I didn't post mine :D

BUT - you have to make sure you're sorting on the right thing... you won't be if you just cmp on xxMarxxxx. You should grab the year, month and day and convert the month to the numeric equivalent and then format it as YYYYMMDD. Then <=> it

Update:
Took me a little bit to get the hang of it, but this works:
use strict; my @months = qw( Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec ); my %months; my @files = qw ( fwlog.14Mar2005.gz fwlog.15Mar2005.gz fwlog.16Mar2005.gz fwlog.17Mar2005.gz fwlog.18Mar2005.gz fwlog.19Mar2005.gz fwlog.1Mar2005.gz fwlog.20Dec2005.gz fwlog.21Mar2005.gz fwlog.2Mar2005.gz fwlog.3Mar2005.gz fwlog.4Mar2005.gz fwlog.5Jan2006.gz fwlog.6Mar2005.gz fwlog.7Mar2005.gz fwlog.8Mar2005.gz fwlog.9Mar2005.gz ); my $i = 1; $months{$_} = sprintf( "%02d", $i++ ) for @months; print $_, "\n" for map { $_->[0] } sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] or $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] or $a->[3] <=> $b->[3] } map { (split(/\./,$_,3))[1] =~ /^(\d+)([A-Za-z]+)(\d+)$/; [$_, sprintf( "%02d", $3), $months{$2}, $1 ] } @files;
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It's sad that a family can be torn apart by such a such a simple thing as a pack of wild dogs