sorting files according to contents

I am trying to make a bulletin board system.

I need to order the posts by the times by which they were posted. So lets say I have posts:
1.txt --> time: 6/15/2001
2.txt --> time: 6/9/2001
3.txt --> time: 6/19/2001

Sorting them greatest to least I get 3, 2, 1.
Sorting them by time (inside the file) I need to get 3, 1, 2.
Time is inside the file like this
field~field~field~field~field~TIME HERE

So what I need to do is open each file and retrieve time from each of them. Then sort the times greatest to least, then "revert" back so that I am sorting the post numbers.

I have an idea on how to do it, but I have no idea how to code it.

Any help is appreciated.

Here is a small script I created on Linux. It can use some cleaning up, but it works. It assumes...

Filename: filename.txt
Contents: field~field~field~field~field~yyyymmdd

I would recommend reformatting your date so that it follows the form yyyymmdd. That would be handier to sort. Otherwise, you could do some substituting to get it in a form suitable for sorting.

Hope this helps,
Bob

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$dir = "/dir";
@files = glob ("$dir/*.txt");
foreach $file (@files) {
open (FH, "$file");
my $line = <FH>;
chomp $line;
my @parts = split (/~/,$line);
$time{$parts[$#parts]} = $file; # Build %time hash.
close (FH);
}
foreach $key (sort (keys %time)) {
print "$time{$key} = $key\n";
}
exit;