The List::Util stuff is definitely cool, but I don't quite understand why you say it reduces the number of stat calls. I would have thought that you need to stat every candidate file just once, whether you use List::Util 'reduce' or something like the more mundane hash: 
my %file_date;
for ( glob '/path/to/*.log' ) {
    $file_date{$_} = (stat)[9];
}
my $newest = ( sort { $file_date{$b} <=> $file_date{$a} } keys %file_a
+ge )[0];

[download]

(update: changed name of hash to be consistent with what it stores)

In reply to Re^2: how to list the files in dir with respect to time by graff
in thread how to list the files in dir with respect to time by swaroop

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