Hello dear Monks, I need to rename many files (~5,000) in a directory. They have the following structure: 8_2007_5_22_15_34_23_Table_-_2007522_XYZ_W3.pdf and I need to strip off the first 7 numbers (userID and then year-month-day-hour-minute-second). The challenge here is that some of them might actually have the same filename remaining after this operation, like the following example:

8_2007_5_22_15_34_23_Table_-_2007522_XYZ_W3.pdf
8_2007_5_22_22_34_12_Table_-_2007522_XYZ_W3.pdf
[download]

So, in this case, I would like to keep only the most recent one. To do this, I can use the following simple code I wrote:

use Date::Parse;

$file1 = '2019-3-25T14:40:22';
$file2 = '2019-6-12T22:34:8';
if (str2time( $file1 ) - str2time( $file2 ))
{
 print "$file1 is more recent than $file2\n";
}
[download]

after transforming the dates into the above-mentioned command. My problem is, how to go about finding and comparing the ones that actually have the same filename, after stripping out the unnecessary information from the beginning - so that I know which ones I need to compare. any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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