In addition to what RudiC already said (and, by the way, if your programming language is not some shell - i assume that it is, but my assumption might be wrong - it would be nice to know which one that is). Notice, though, that most shells don't support multidimenisonal arrays and especially not assiociative arrays:

What exactly do you mean by "sort all the elements"? For a sorting you need some key - alphabetical, numerical, by date or whatever - and something to sort. An array, regardless of being multidimensional or not, contains several elements. The elements have an index - basically their position in the array - and some content. Do you want to sort the contents or the indices to be sorted?

If it is the indices: these are multi-value items in a multidimensional array and it is not clear which part of these take priority: i.e. if you have 3 entries, [1,10], [2,5] and [10,1], which one is supposed to be first? If the first element takes priority the order would be [1,10], [2,5], [10,1], if the second element takes priority you have [10,1], [2,5], [1,10], if the sum of both entries is the sort criteria it is [2,5], [1,10], [10,1], etc..

If it is the contents you are trying to sort you simply need to traverse through the indices of one dimension after the other using simple for-loops, i.e. for a 3-dimensional array with numerical indices (pseudocode):

Code:

for i in 1..10
     for j in 1..10
          for k in 1..10
               print array[i,j,k]
          next
     next
next

and sort the resulting list.

I hope this helps.

bakunin