Very nice solution!

A small improvement makes the regex a bit more specific and have it reject filenames that do not match the expected file name template.

use strict;
use warnings;

my %names;

/^([^.]+)\.(\d{3})$/ and $names{$1}[$2] = $_ while <DATA>;

print $names{$_}[-1] for sort keys %names;

__DATA__
file.001
file.003
not.good.001
file.002
file.10
one.004
two.001
two.003
two.five
one.002
one.001
one.0039
two.002
.005

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CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

My blog: Imperial Deltronics

In reply to Re^2: Find the last item in a series of files by CountZero
in thread Find the last item in a series of files by fredho

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