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Message: [QUOTE="Rasmus Villemoes, post: 4863092"] Let me see if I understand what's going on: The last two lines builds an array of refs. Each ref is a reference to an anonymous array with exactly two entries: a maybe-key and the length of $h{key} (or some large number). Then this array of refs is sorted according to the contents of the [1] entry of the ref'ed anonymous array, and finally one extracts the [0] entry from each anonymous array. Smart. Yes, that it is what I was trying to achieve. But I would expect that the allocation of memory for all these small anonymous arrays would be rather time-consuming, also. Thanks to everybody for your answers. They confirm perl's slogan, and it's nice to see the different approaches. For the time being I will use &&-expressions and apply a decreasing function to length() so that the overall comparison of existing keys ends up in ascending order. If no elements are longer than 9 this actually works: my @ks = qw(two three one four); my %h = ( one => 1, three => 333 ); for (sort { (exists $h{$b} && 10-length $h{$b}) <=> (exists $h{$a} && 10-length $h{$a}) } @ks) { print "$_\n" } [/QUOTE]