Steve Golamco wrote: > I have a directory (say, dir-A) wherein every 10 minutes an 'autosave' file > is created. These files are named 'reports.*.autosave' where the asterisk > would represent some numeric value. These numeric values are NOT in > any particular sequence. Every 10 minutes, I need to copy the most recent > (latest) of these save file to another directory (say, dir-B) . I cannot > make the application directly generate the autosave file to dir-B. Is > there > a way to do this in Perl?
First you have to find some way to determine the creation date of the file. If you are doing this on a *nix system then there is no creation date so you have to use another method. If you are on a system that has a creation date then there may be a module somewhere that gives you that information. An example of what you need using the modification time that works on *nix systems: my $dir = 'dir-A'; opendir my $dh, $dir or die "Cannot open '$dir' $!"; my ( $last_file, $last_modified ); while ( my $file = readdir $dh ) { ( $last_file, $last_modified ) = ( $file, -M "$dir/$file" ) if $last_modified < -M "$dir/$file"; } print "The newest file in $dir is $last_file.\n"; 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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/