in reply to using grep on a directory to list files for a single date

I think that parsing the output of a shell command is the fastest you can go:

ls -R  --time=ctime --time-style="+%Y-%m-%d" -g -o

This gives a text like:

./htdocs/gui/img/control/default/cs-iso:
total 160
-rw-r-Sr--    1     1426 2004-10-28 cs-iso_abschic.gif
-rw-r-Sr--    1     1778 2004-10-28 cs-iso_admission_data.gif
-rw-r-Sr--    1     1479 2004-10-28 cs-iso_admit-blue.gif
...

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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom