thanks everybody. i get it now and fixed it. I did know I was doing it all wrong of course, that's why i posted. For some reason I couldn't see where the scalars and arrays were in this. everything was working till i had to add the sort - i wasn't able to back out and see where changes had to be made. i appreciate the help. hopefully people learn from my dumb posts.

#SEARCH THROUGH THE CONTENT DIRECTORY AND FIND THE FILES THAT MATCH
chdir("$contentdir");#change to the content directory
my $stuff = ".";#make it $_
opendir THISDIR, "$stuff";#open the content directory
my @submenu = readdir THISDIR;#put the names of the files in an array
closedir THISDIR;
for (1..2) {shift @submenu;} 

my @aaa;
for (@submenu) {
push(@aaa,[split /\_/,$_,3]);
}

my @final = sort {$a->[2] <=> $b->[2] } @aaa;
for (@final) {
my $cat=$_->[0];
my $title=$_->[1];
my $rankk=$_->[2];
(my $rank, $tossit) = split (/\./, $rankk,2);

#foreach submenu item print it
if ($cat=~$main)
{
$counter++;
if ($counter > 1) {
print "<a href \= \"/cgi-bin/idx.pl?$sub1$sep$sub2$sep$sub3\">";
print "$sub2";
print "</a>";

etc., etc. i know this isn't pretty, but it is what it is.
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