perl -e 'my $lf = (sort(<*>))[-1];print $lf'
[download]

perl -e 'my $foo = (stat("myfile"))[7];print $foo'
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Aaah. As the germans say: "I get the crisis!"

my $lf = (sort(<*>))[-1];
print $lf,"\n";
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works. While the (what I tested)

print (sort(<*>))[-1], "\n";
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throws a

print (...) interpreted as function at ./template.pl line 6.
syntax error at ./template.pl line 6, near ")["
Execution of ./template.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

Bye
 PetaMem     All Perl:   MT, NLP, NLU

print (...) interpreted as function...

possible solutions:

print ((sort(<*>))[-1]), "\n";
# or
print+(sort(<*>))[-1], "\n";
[download]

see also print (...) interpreted as function

---

He who asks will be a fool for five minutes, but he who doesn't ask will remain a fool for life.

Chady | http://chady.net/

Oh that's easy, parenthesisation. Try this:

perl -e 'print((sort(<*>))[1]);'
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Once the expression is fully inside parentheses, there is no syntax error. With the square brackets outside the parens, it must be trying to get the first element of the array returned by print(), which doesn't return an array.

If you want the lexically last file in the directory, you don't need to sort as glob sorts it output anyway--least on my system it does.

perl -le"print +(<*>)[-1]"
XXX_I386
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"At least on my system"? Oh now that's not good enough! perldoc -f glob says: "Beginning with v5.6.0, this operator is implemented using the standard "File::Glob" extension. See File::Glob for details."

perldoc File::Glob says: ""GLOB_NOSORT" By default, the pathnames are sorted in ascending ASCII order; this flag prevents that sorting (speeding up bsd_glob())."

So there we go, a definitive answer for Perls greater than 5.6.0. As for previous Perls, upgrade already!

I didn't need to look it up. I already knew it sorted on my system :)

Upgrade?

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algoritm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

works perfectly:

[1158]tom@margo scratch $ perl -e 'my $lf = (sort(<*>))[-1]; print $lf
+, "\n";'
zoom?id=aaaaaaaaaaaawax
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What did you expect? What did you get?

Perhaps there are no files in the directory where you tried you second snippet?

Try this in any *nix box:

perl -e 'my $lf = (sort(</bin/*>))[-1];print $lf'
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