Hi,

I am trying to find the last modified file in a directory and do something with it like move or copy.

I know how to read the directory, move, copy and get the last modified date of a file but I need the script to find the ONE file which is the very recent file in a windows folder.

I have being trying various methods, like extract the modified date and compare it to the current date, but cannot convert the dates into a format where I can extract them from each other to find the lowest value so I can extract that file!

I would be grateful is anyone can advise or point me in the right direction to accomplish what I am trying to do, either by using a module or command to extract the most recent file in a directory or calculate dates as mentioned above.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks...

it would have been nice if you posted your code or the relevant part of your code. You use stat() or a file test operator, I believe it's -C (uppercase C) to find the most recent file by date. You should just be using time to compare the file creation date to the current date.

Hi,

Thats great...got it working...thanks very much!!

Dal

Hi,

Not quite getting it too work, thought I had! anyway below is the code I am using but not getting the most recent file in directory back, in fact I get nothing back! I would appreciate any help...thanks.

my $directory = "\\\\TESTINGSQL\\memorandum_export\\log\\";

opendir(DIR2, "$directory");
@files = readdir(DIR2);
$arrlength = @files;
closedir(DIR2);


my $xmlcount = 0;

for ($x = 0; $x <= $arrlength; $x++)

{

$filename = "$directory@files[$x]";
if (@files[$x] =~ m/.txt/ )
{
if (-C @files[$x] )
{
print "@files[$x]\n";
}
}
$xmlcount++
}

First use the grep() function to get the .txt files:

Actually -C was wrong, it is -M for the modification date. You have to use the sort{} function to sort the file to know which is the most recently modified:

Fantastic!!