Perl Cookbook

Finding Fresh Links

Problem

Given a list of URLs, you want to determine which have been most recently modified.

Solution

The program in Example 20.6 reads URLs from standard input, rearranges by date, and prints them back to standard output with those dates prepended.

Example 20-6. surl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# surl - sort URLs by their last modification date

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
use URI::URL qw(url);

my($url, %Date);
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();

while ( $url = url(scalar <>) ) {
    my $ans;
    next unless $url->scheme =~ /^(file|https?)$/;
    $ans = $ua->request(HTTP::Request->new("HEAD", $url));
    if ($ans->is_success) {
        $Date{$url} = $ans->last_modified || 0;  # unknown
    } else {
        print STDERR "$url: Error [", $ans->code, "] ", $ans->message, "!\n";
    }
}

foreach $url ( sort { $Date{$b} <=> $Date{$a} } keys %Date ) {
    printf "%-25s %s\n", $Date{$url} ? (scalar localtime $Date{$url})
                                     : "<NONE SPECIFIED>", $url;
}

Discussion

The surl script works more like a traditional filter program. It reads from standard input one URL per line. (Actually, it reads from <ARGV>, which defaults to STDIN if @ARGV is empty.) The last-modified date on each URL is fetched using a HEAD request. That date is stored in a hash using the URL for a key. Then a simple sort by value is run on the hash to reorder the URLs by date. On output, the internal date is converted into localtime format.

Here’s an example of using the xurl program from the earlier recipe to extract the URLs, then running that program’s ...