There are many ways to do this trick, but they all depend on pulling out the sort key (in this case the second column). A simple way for small quantites of data is to use a hash:
use strict;
use warnings;
my %data;
while (<DATA>) {
my $key = /^\d+\s+(\d+)/ ? $1 : next;
$data{$key} = $_;
}
print $data{$_} for sort keys %data;
__DATA__
77876 8543 CA84985 54E
77873 8003 CA84985 54E
77875 7725 CA84985 54E
77872 8511 CA84985 54E
77873 8123 CA84985 54E
77822 9908 CA84985 54E
77819 8503 CA84985 54E
77826 8040 CA84985 54E
77822 7874 CA84985 54E
77884 8543 CA84985 54E
77809 7211 CA84985 54E
Prints:
77809 7211 CA84985 54E
77875 7725 CA84985 54E
77822 7874 CA84985 54E
77873 8003 CA84985 54E
77826 8040 CA84985 54E
77873 8123 CA84985 54E
77819 8503 CA84985 54E
77872 8511 CA84985 54E
77884 8543 CA84985 54E
77822 9908 CA84985 54E
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel