Hi,

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

I am trying to read the directory and get the latest modified file in a windows folder using the below code but it is not giving me the latest modified file.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use warnings;

my $directory = 'C:\\Perl\\site\\lib\\new';
opendir(DIR2, $directory) or die "Can't open $directory: $!";
@files = readdir(DIR2);
closedir(DIR2);

@sorted = sort {-M "$directory$a" <=> -M "$directory$b"} @files; #sort them by modification date most recent to least recent
print "The most recent modified file is: $sorted[0]";


Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks...

Should be $directory\\$file.

Incidentally, you might try doing this if you have a huge number of files:

Hitting stat (or the Win32 equivalent) is fairly expensive. You could make it even faster by rolling the -M values into the keys and using straight sort(@files), but that's often overkill.