I have a target number (ctime of a file) and a list of epoch times. I need to find the epoch time from the list that is closest to the target number. It does not matter if the epoch from the list is <,= or > than the target number.

What I have come up with so far is this: 

my %tmphash;
my $ctime = (stat($key))[10];
print "IN MULTIPLES \$ctime is $ctime\n";
for (@returns)
{
   print "Working Multiple match: $_\n";
   $tmphash{abs($ctime - $_)} = $_;
}
print "MULTIPLE MATCH best match = ".
      $tmphash{(reverse(sort(keys(%tmphash))))[0]}."\n";

[download]
Does anyone have any comments, suggestions or better ideas on how to do this?

In reply to Find a number in a list closest to a target by gnu@perl

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