I wonder if all java programmers are this cagey/evasive about describing their problem sets...

Even so, now we're just talking about a two-stage sort:

## let's suppose the file names are in column 3 of "table.txt":

perl -pe 's/^/$.,/' table.txt | sort -t , -k 4,4 -k 1,1n | cut -f2- -d
+, | splitter.pl
[download]

where "splitter.pl" is a version of your suggested script that assumes lines are pre-sorted by output file name -- so it really needs only one output file handle open at any one time. By pre-pending the original line numbers before sorting, and using the line numbers as a secondary sort field, the (presumably) intended result is achieved.

(update: if the original table has file names in column 3, and a perl script prepends a line number to each line, then the primary sort column has to be 4, not 3.)

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