Since you only care about the record order when your viewing the records then you should probably do one of the following

1: If you are a fan of the command line view the file using tail. This will show you the last X lines of the file.

2. Write to a different file for each day/week/month(which one depends on expected website usage).

3. Have a cron/somehow scheduled perl script to create a new file with the records ordered the way you want them and view this file.

All of these have disadvantages but they allow you to keep the complexity out of the cgi script and are (probably/possibly) more efficient and less error prone.

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