Find latest file name in C

Question

Would like to fopen() the latest file in a directory
(with naming scheme file1.txt, file2.txt, file3.txt, etc.)
Is there an API function in Visual Studio for this?
If not, is it a good idea to read in all the .txt file names and sort to get the one I need? Is there a better algorithm I could be pointed to?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm going to assume by "latest" you mean "most recently modified file."

There is a C run time library function _fstat and _fstati64 (for large files > 4GB). The function signature for _fstat is:

int _fstat(int file_handle, struct _stat *file_info);

The _stat structure has a bit of useful information about the file, but you likely want the st_mtime member, which has the last modified time as a time_t (time in seconds since 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970).

It may work to use the win32 functions FindFirstFile() and FindNextFile() to walk the directory, store the files in an array of a structure (containing the file name modified time) and then call qsort_s() on the array, sorting by time, in descending order.

I hope that helps.