Here's a possible way that you can run into this blunder, a good possible 'newbish' problem.

# Generate files...
my $time = time();
open FILE ">$time.txt" or die $!;
print FILE  $stuff;
close FILE;
# this is repeated often, as from CGI...
#
# Retrieval now...
my @files = get_list_of_files();
@files = sort { $a cmb $b } @files;
foreach my $file ( @files ) {
   do_something_with_file ( $file );
}
[download]

If the files are created across the 9/9/01 boundary, you are going to missort these later.

Oddly enough, I use this exact technique in my recent code snippet, notepad.pl; however, I do protect from this by sprintf'ing the time into a much much longer string that should be ok until 64-bit systems...without that sprintf, that code suffers from the same problem.

}

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain