_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

Is there any way to sort what find returns by the time
stamp?

File::Find just retrieves all of the filenames and calls your "wanted" function once on each name. Anything more sophisticated has to be implemented by you in terms of this "wanted" function.

For example, the following script will perform a find on /tmp, then print all of the file names in order from most recent to oldest:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use File::Find;

my @files;
sub wanted {
    push @files, [ $File::Find::name, -M $_ ];
}
find(\&wanted, "/tmp");

foreach (sort {$a->[1] <=> $b->[1]} @files) {
    print $_->[0], "\n";
}
[download]

As you can see, within the wanted function, we collect each filename and the time it was last modified. Once find() finishes, we then sort the files into the desired order and print them out.

See the preprocess argument -- if you pass a code reference, it'll apply it to the list returned by readdir before calling your wanted coderef. Something like this, perhaps:

find({ wanted => \&wanted, preprocess => sub {
    sort { -M $a <=> -M $b } @_;
},
}, '.');
[download]

When in doubt, RTFS. Specifically, _find_opt and _find_dir are what does the real work.

less `perl -MFile::Find -le 'print $INC{"File/Find.pm"}'`
[download]

Ouch. perldoc -m File::Find.