List files in order of last modified - help

[kellypayton]

Hey ok i would appreciate any help you very helpful people can give me on this. below is the piece of code i use to display a list of all files within a folder. it displays them great but i want it to display them in the order they were last modified.

opendir THEDIR, "$config{'basepath'}/gigfiles" or &error("Unable to open directory: $!");
readdir THEDIR; readdir THEDIR;
my @allfiles = readdir THEDIR;
closedir THEDIR;
my $file;
foreach $file (sort @allfiles) {
$file =~ s/.dat$//;

That code reads all the files in the directory and then i use $file inside my output which displays them on the screen. What changes do i make to that code to display them in order of last modified please??

thank you in advance for any help you can offer. xx

 

[tchatzi]

You first have to get the modified time for every file and store it with the file name. Something like this

$dir = qq~$config{'basepath'}/gigfiles~;
opendir THEDIR, "$dir" or &error("Unable to open directory: $!");
my @allfiles = readdir THEDIR;
closedir THEDIR;
my $file;
foreach $file (@allfiles) {
        next if $file=~ /^\.*$/;  #so you can take out the dot directories
	($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size, $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat($file);	
	$files{$file} = $mtime;
}

#then go that link and you will find something like this 
foreach $key (sort { $hash{$a} cmp $hash{$b} } keys %files) {
	print $key."\n";
}

bytheway you don't need to put readir 2000 times! (unless it was a typo, in which case sorry to mention it)


``The wise man doesn't give the right answers,
he poses the right questions.'
TIMTOWTDI

 

[zbnet]

If you only need the $mtime value from the stat command, it's more efficient to slice the array in the assignment:

$files{$file} = stat($file)[9];

replaces all this:

    ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size, $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat($file);    
    $files{$file} = $mtime;