I bow to your superiour knowledge.
In my own defence (or probably damnation) Most of the code is a quick hack I threw together to solve a problem at hand. It worked, so I didn't tweak it. Looking back, I should have.
As an aside, I didn't pick the sort routine as for its speed, I picked it for its ease of coding. this is lifted from some code thats going to be run nightly, at a time when the servers going to be unused. in a test on sample data, it doesn't take too long to work, so is suitable for the job.
In the end, I'm not arguing with you. Its not pretty, its not fast. It's also not a good use of the functions perl has available. but it does work, and its simple to understand.
Thanks for the code btw, as its here, I should probably try it