First, a quick tip. If you can use <c></c> around your code, it will make it much easier for others to read it. To illustrate the difference, Corion's response to your post is using those tags.

If I read your post correctly, you're wanting to do the following:

• Find all files within a specified directory that whose file name starts with a user specified string
• Of those files that were found, return just the file that has the latest last modified (updated) time stamp

Based on that assumption, here's the general method that I would take to do that task (without being concerned with efficiency):

• Use File::Find to find the list of files in the specified directory with the file name requirements
• Loop through that list and use either stat or File::stat to determine which file has the latest modified date.

This might not be the most efficient method of doing it, but it would be approach that I personally would start off with.