Sort::fields provides a general purpose technique for efficiently sorting lists of lines that contain data separated into fields.

sort::fields automatically imports two subroutines, fieldsort and make_fieldsort, and two variants, stable_fieldsort and make_stable_fieldsort. make_fieldsort generates a sorting subroutine and returns a reference to it. fieldsort is a wrapper for the make_fieldsort subroutine.

the first argument to make_fieldsort is a delimiter string, which is used as a regular expression argument for a split operator. the delimiter string is optional. if it is not supplied, make_fieldsort splits each line using /\s+/.