I recently needed to compile an automatic image show with a digital projector which could show JPG images by itself. However, it showed them sorted by time, oldest image first, not by name (I did name them 000.jpg, 001.jpg, etc.). So I decided to change the modification dates in an incremental way. A simply shell loop with touch didn't give good enough results, I need to add sleep 1; (or even 2) which of course takes too long.

So, Perl came to the rescue: The following small script takes a list of files and gives the last file the current time while every previous file is dated one second earlier. This worked very well with my projector. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $timestamp = time;

for my $file (reverse @ARGV) {
    utime $timestamp, $timestamp, $file;
    $timestamp--;
}

[download]

In reply to Incremental date for a list of files by mscharrer

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.