How can I find the newest created file in a directory?

Question

Is there an elegant way in Perl to find the newest file in a directory (newest by modification date)?

What I have so far is searching for the files I need, and for e

Answer 1

You don't need to keep all of the modification times and filenames in a list, and you probably shouldn't. All you need to do is look at one file and see if it's older than the oldest you've previously seen:

{
    opendir my $dh, $dir or die "Could not open $dir: $!";

    my( $newest_name, $newest_time ) = ( undef, 2**31 -1 );

    while( defined( my $file = readdir( $dh ) ) ) {
        my $path = File::Spec->catfile( $dir, $file );
        next if -d $path; # skip directories, or anything else you like
        ( $newest_name, $newest_time ) = ( $file, -M _ ) if( -M $path < $newest_time );
    }

    print "Newest file is $newest_name\n";
}