I'm trying to find the oldest file in a directory whose name contains the word "BOT", but when I have multiple files to look at and I try to find "mtime" from File::Stat, it tells me that I can't call "mtime" on an undefined value.

I don't understand why when I'm looping through the file names they come back as undefined?

Here's my code, if you change the directory name and run it, you should see what I mean:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use File::stat;
use CGI;
use strict;

my $cgi = new CGI;
print $cgi->header;

my $dirname = '/www/htdocs/reports/bot/';

my $oldestfile = 0;
my $filename = "No BOT REPORT: ERROR";

opendir(DIR, $dirname) or die "can't opendir $dirname: $!";
while (my $file = readdir(DIR)) {
  if ($file =~ /BOT/){
    my $x = stat($file)->mtime;
    if ( $x > $oldestfile) {
      $oldestfile = $x;
      $filename = $file;      
    }
  }
}
print <<EOF;
<a href="http://192.168.0.1/reports/bot/$filename"><strong>$filename</
+strong></a> - BOT Report.<br>
EOF

closedir(DIR);

[download]

In reply to Finding Oldest File in a Directory by awohld

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.