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Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Perl: Can someone please explain this code "sort { $a <=> $b } @unsorted" Post 303032141 by jim mcnamara on Tuesday 12th of March 2019 07:00:10 PM
Old 03-12-2019
the spaceship operator, <=>, is a comparison function, for numeric data only. It compares elements in the input array, @unsorted. The output of the sort call is written to the array @sorted. If no comparison function statement was entered (a blank), then sort works on the @unsoted array as letters of the alphabet, not numbers.

$a and $b are individual elements in the unosrted array - in this case numbers

If element $a is equal to element $b, then it returns 0; if $a is less than $b it returns -1; if $a is greater it returns +1 .

So the general statement is:
Code:
@output_array = sort [optional comparison function]  @input_array

Internally perl sort calls a standard C library function, qsort for doing the comparisons and reordering over and entire array -or at least it did years ago.
qsort(3): sort array - Linux man page
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QSORT(3)						     Linux Programmer's Manual							  QSORT(3)

NAME
qsort, qsort_r - sort an array SYNOPSIS
#include <stdlib.h> void qsort(void *base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (*compar)(const void *, const void *)); void qsort_r(void *base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (*compar)(const void *, const void *, void *), void *arg); Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)): qsort_r(): _GNU_SOURCE DESCRIPTION
The qsort() function sorts an array with nmemb elements of size size. The base argument points to the start of the array. The contents of the array are sorted in ascending order according to a comparison function pointed to by compar, which is called with two arguments that point to the objects being compared. The comparison function must return an integer less than, equal to, or greater than zero if the first argument is considered to be respec- tively less than, equal to, or greater than the second. If two members compare as equal, their order in the sorted array is undefined. The qsort_r() function is identical to qsort() except that the comparison function compar takes a third argument. A pointer is passed to the comparison function via arg. In this way, the comparison function does not need to use global variables to pass through arbitrary arguments, and is therefore reentrant and safe to use in threads. RETURN VALUE
The qsort() and qsort_r() functions return no value. VERSIONS
qsort_r() was added to glibc in version 2.8. CONFORMING TO
The qsort() function conforms to SVr4, 4.3BSD, C89, C99. NOTES
Library routines suitable for use as the compar argument to qsort() include alphasort(3) and versionsort(3). To compare C strings, the comparison function can call strcmp(3), as shown in the example below. EXAMPLE
For one example of use, see the example under bsearch(3). Another example is the following program, which sorts the strings given in its command-line arguments: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> static int cmpstringp(const void *p1, const void *p2) { /* The actual arguments to this function are "pointers to pointers to char", but strcmp(3) arguments are "pointers to char", hence the following cast plus dereference */ return strcmp(* (char * const *) p1, * (char * const *) p2); } int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int j; if (argc < 2) { fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s <string>... ", argv[0]); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } qsort(&argv[1], argc - 1, sizeof(char *), cmpstringp); for (j = 1; j < argc; j++) puts(argv[j]); exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); } SEE ALSO
sort(1), alphasort(3), strcmp(3), versionsort(3) COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.44 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/. 2012-03-08 QSORT(3)
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