First of all, you make 5 calls to localtime which has the potential to go very wrong (for instance, imagine if it's New Year's Eve and the first 3 calls happen before the clock strikes midnight and the last two happen after it).

Basically, you're doing the conversion backwards. You want to convert all your times to single integers (using something like Time::Local) and then calculate whether they are close enough together.

If you get stuck trying to do that, let us know how far you got and we can go from there.

This code will find the file modified less than a minute ago:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;
use File::Spec;

my $dirname = '.';

opendir( my $dir, $dirname ) or die $!;
my $file;
while ( $file = readdir($dir) ) {
    last if ( stat( File::Spec->catfile( $dirname, $file ) ) )[9] + 60
+ > time;
    $file = '';
}

say $file;
[download]

Alternatively (it depends on what you really need if that solution would fit you), if there's only log files in directory, you can get list of files, sort it, and use last file.

Dear zwon,
I ran your code, I only have perl 5.8 version so it errored out for that and it also gave me other problems.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Data::Dumper;
use Time::localtime;
use File::stat;
use Term::ANSIColor;    
use Net::FTP;

use warnings;

use File::Spec;
my $dirname = '.';
opendir( my $dir, $dirname ) or die $!;
my $file;
while ( $file = readdir($dir) ) {
    last if ( stat( File::Spec->catfile( $dirname, $file ) ) )[9] + 60
+ > time;
    $file = '';
}

[download]

The only 5.10 feature I've used is say and you can replace it by print. I recommend you to use strict as it helps to prevent some errors. Do you have any other problems with my example?

Since the value returned by -M is in days, you have to know that 1 minute equals 0.0006944 days:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my $Usage = "Usage:  $0  pathname\n";
die $Usage unless ( @ARGV == 1 and -d $ARGV[0] );
my $dir = shift;

opendir( DIR, $dir ) or die "opendir $dir failed: $!\n";

my @newfiles = grep { -f "$dir/$_" && -M _ < 0.000694445 } readdir DIR
+;

printf( "Found %d new files at %s\n", scalar @newfiles, scalar localti
+me );
print "  " ,   join( "\n  ", @newfiles ) . "\n" if ( @newfiles );
[download]

Now, if there happens to a file that was created an hour (day, week, month, year) ago and was modified within the last minute (i.e. its content changed, by appending or altering data), it will be reported as "new" regardless of its name, along with any file that was actually created within the last minute. If you don't want that, then you'll need to fall back to checking the file names.

(I tried the "-C" function as well, but on my macosx/BSD system, it behaved the same as "-M" -- still, you might test it under solaris to see if "inode change time" is different in some useful way from "modification time".)

Note that -M reports file age relative to the time at which your script began running, so the length of time it takes to run the script has no effect on the results (the last file fetched from the directory will be judged by the same criterion as the first file, no matter how many files are in the directory).