Re^4: Argument isn't numeric in sort -- resolve or ignore?

[Argel]

Yeah, it's been probably more than five years since I had to write my own sort routine and faulty memory did me in. It doesn't help that all but three of the sites in my actual data have numbers in them and most are all numbers, so it appeared to be working. Thanks for the help!!

[davido]

In the end, your intuition was correct (don't ignore the warnings unless you know why they're happening), and the warnings served their purpose (alerted you to a potential bug). They may not have explicitly come out and said what was wrong with the code, but they did point to the region of code where the Perl runtime was sensing a possible problem, and with a little digging you presumably have been able to fix the issue..

[Argel]

Right you are. I do not like warnings I do not understand, so after reading up on smartmatch (which I thought was the problem) and searching on the error message, I decided to post here to see if someone could figure out the problem. And I took the advice and fixed the return codes for my_sort and replaced smartmatch with greps, and have a working custom sort routine now. I also didn't know smartmatch was moved into experimental status, which was an added bonus. Thanks again to everyone!!