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All,

I am trying to glob a directory, storing the filenames into an array.
The trick is that I then want to sort that array by the files'
timestamps. Is there an easy way to do this?

TIA!

wrote:
>I am trying to glob a directory, storing the filenames into an array.
>The trick is that I then want to sort that array by the files'
>timestamps. Is there an easy way to do this?

Looping through and stat()ing hundreds or thousands of files individually is
going to be slow. Depending upon _which_ timestamp (created, accessed,
modified, ...) you want to sort by it may be significantly faster to call an
external program (e.g. ls) with the proper parameters and simply capture the
output.

jue

wrote:
> All,
>
> I am trying to glob a directory, storing the filenames into an array.
> The trick is that I then want to sort that array by the files'
> timestamps. Is there an easy way to do this?

The glob() is going to do its own sort, so that would be wasteful.

Better to opendir(), grep() a readdir() for the required items, closedir()
and then sort those by stat()ing for {modified,changed,accessed} time.

Don't forget to see "perldoc -f stat" about the use of "_" to minimize
file system hits.

hth
t

wrote:
> All,
>
> I am trying to glob a directory, storing the filenames into an array.
> The trick is that I then want to sort that array by the files'
> timestamps. Is there an easy way to do this?
>
> TIA!

For example (UNTESTED):

my $dir = 'something';

opendir my $DH, $dir or die "Cannot opendir '$dir' $!";

my @sorted_files =
map $_->[1],
sort { $a->[0] <=> $b->[0] }
map -f "$dir/$_" ? [ ( stat _ )[9], $_ ] : (),
readdir $DH;



John
--
Perl isn't a toolbox, but a small machine shop where you
can special-order certain sorts of tools at low cost and
in short order. -- Larry Wall

Thanks to all of you, John your code was especially helpful.