aatlamaz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am able to find the latest file in my directory by using following code, but I need to find the newest file as well. Any idea how to do that? Is there any PM for that? Thanks 
my $dir = "C:\\Perl";
opendir DH, $dir or die "Cant open $dir: $!";

foreach $file (readdir DH) {
    print "files in $dir id $file\n";
} 
closedir DH;

my $oldest;
my $oldtime = 0;
for (glob "$dir/*") {
  my $thistime = -C;
  if ($thistime > $oldtime) {
    ($oldest, $oldtime) = ($_, $thistime);
  } 
}
printf "The oldest file was %s, and it was %.1f days old.\n", $oldest,
+ $oldtime;

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Finding Newest File in Perl
by zentara (Cardinal) on Dec 07, 2004 at 13:35 UTC
    Modify for either newest or latest: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

$dir = shift || '.';

my $latest = (sort {$b->{mtime} <=> $a->{mtime}}
             map {{mtime => -M $_, file => $_}}
             <$dir/*>)[-1];

print $latest->{file}, "\n";

#Using map allows -M to be performed on each file only once  
#per sort iteration. 
#once will save a lot of CPU time.

    [download]
    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
[reply]
[d/l]
      Thanks Guys, Thanks Zentara, it works great now!...
[reply]
Re: Finding Newest File in Perl
by neniro (Priest) on Dec 07, 2004 at 10:53 UTC
    You can iterate over all those files. Test each file for it's timestamp. If it's bigger than the previous, store the file-name into a variable. That's it.
[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom