How to sort lines in an array?

[Anja Friedrich]

Hi all,

I have another question. I have an array sorted like this:
small_motif_a 1853 1863
small_motif_a 1970 1980
small_motif_a 1971 1981
small_motif_b 789 799
small_motif_b 882 892
small_motif_b 1181 1191
small_motif_b 1193 1203
small_motif_b 1264 1274
and so on

now I want to sort it ascending. I tried it with this code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Bio::Perl;

my @var;
my @lines;
my @sort_col;
@sort_col=();
@lines=();
@var=();
my $column;
my $varfilename;

print "Enter the filename of your input file with the variants:= ";		
chomp ($varfilename=<STDIN>);
open (VARINPUT,'<',$varfilename) or die ("$varfilename Can not open file\n");
@var=<VARINPUT>;
#print @var;
			
$column=1; 
while(<VARINPUT>) 
{ 
 s/\r?\n//; 
 @var=split /\t/, $_; 
 push @sort_col, $var[$column]; 
 push @lines, "$_\n"; 
} 
@lines=sort {$sort_col[$b] <=> $sort_col[$c] } @lines;
warn "\nSorted $. lines in ascending order, based on numerical values in column $column\n\n"; 
print @lines [sort { $sort_col[$b] <=> $sort_col[$c] } 0..$#sort_col];
print "@lines\n";

but it is not working.
Anyone an idea please?

[toolic]

You should use $a and $b (not $b and $c) in your sort block. I'm surprised your code compiles without errors with use strict.

[Anja Friedrich]

Well, I had it first with $a and $b but I thought it refers to the columns, and I need to sort the 2nd and 3rd. I don't get an output. Only the message that it was sorted

[chorny]

In first sort you are trying to access array with strings from file as indexes.