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

Assuming you know the $DIR you want to look in:

opendir(my $DH, $DIR) or die "Error opening $DIR: $!";
my %files = map { $_ => (stat("$DIR/$_"))[9] } grep(! /^\.\.?$/, readdir($DH));
closedir($DH);
my @sorted_files = sort { $files{$b} <=> $files{$a} } (keys %files);
# $sorted_files[0] is the most-recently modified. If it isn't the actual
# file-of-interest, you can iterate through @sorted_files until you find
# the interesting file(s).

The grep that wraps the readdir filters out the "." and ".." special files in a UNIX(-ish) filesystem.