Others have suggested you use a database and I tend to agree with them. It's unclear whether you meant 50,000 files or 50,000 directories each with some number of files but either way, searching through that many entries in a filesystem is slow (and hopefully it's not 50,000 files all in one directory!) Another mechanism that you might be able to use is encoding the time information in the file/directory names themselves. Something like:

2004/01/19/00/filename.01
2004/01/19/00/filename.02
2004/01/19/00/filename.03
...
2004/01/19/01/filename.01
...
2004/01/19/02/filename.01
...

[download]

In this hypothetical example the files are arranged by year/month/day/hour/filename.minute. You can see that it would be relatively easy to find the oldest file if you could arrange for such a structure. I don't exactly know if this technique would be useful to your problem, but there it is.

Or you could just use a database like postgres, mysql, berkeley DB, etc. (I believe all of these are available on both linux and windows) with an index created on the time of each entry. :-)

duff

In reply to Re: Quickest way to get the oldest file by duff
in thread Quickest way to get the oldest file by Anonymous Monk

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