Heres what I am trying to do: I have a load of HTML files sorted into days, ie. One for each day, and I have them in a directory structure with one directory for each day of the month, all contained within one directory, and liikewise all months in one directory for that year.


etc etc.

Not every day will have a directory, or every month etc

What I want is an algorithm that will take one unsigned integer that will go back a certain number of "updates" and pull out the HTML file (or give me a path to it), for example if the last 4 updates were on the 26th of April,and the 1st,2nd and 4th of May 2004 and I gave it the number 2, it would give me the third least recent one, ie the one for the 1st of May.

This seems like an easy problem but im having problems finding a simple fast elegant solution to it. and any help would by appreicated. Thanks

1. Create a list of update dates (traverse the directory, grab the dir names, etc.)
2. Sort that list in date order
3. Find the date corresponding to the given index.
4. Use the directory corresponding to that date.

mmm...you`re probably right. I hate sorting

Look into qsort (google)

You don't need sorting if you'd name the directories to 'sort' them using the directory structure. Years are sorted, months can be if you use 01 for Jan, 02 for Feb and so on, days also can be if you use '01' instead of '1'.

thats a good Idea, Mara. Ive implemented the quicksort aggorithm before, but I`d rather not usi it if I don`t have to

Finished! - Ive got a solution I`m happy with.