Here's what I ended up with for extracting uniques and sorting. I know it can be further simplified, but my non-programmer brain can somewhat grok it as is. Thanks again, all!
cheers,
ybiC
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $infile = shift;
my $outfile = shift;
my %seen;
open (IN, "<$infile") or die "Can't open $infile RO: $!";
open (OUT, ">$outfile") or die "Can't open $outfile RW: $!";
foreach my $item (<IN>) { # parse $infile into a hash and remove
+ duplicate keys
++$seen{$item};
}
print OUT sort keys %seen; # sort keys and save to $outfile
close IN or die "Cannot close $infile: $!";
close OUT or die "Cannot close $outfile: $!";