Alien::...ersions(3)

💖 Alien::Build::Plugin::Prefer::SortVersions — bestie, it's the sorting plugin

okay so this is a page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation for Alien::...ersions(3) (that's the truncated title, the real one is the long thing above 💅). sit down, grab a strawberry, we're doing plugins.

✨ NAME ✨

Alien::Build::Plugin::Prefer::SortVersions — it's a Plugin to sort candidates by most recent first. literally that's its whole job and it ate 💅

🌸 VERSION 🌸

version 2.88 — yeah bestie, we're on 2.88, keep up 🫶

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

use alienfile;

plugin 'Prefer::SortVersions';

that's it. that's the whole thing. iconic behavior honestly ✨

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Note: in most case you will want to use Alien::Build::Plugin::Download::Negotiate instead. It picks the appropriate fetch plugin based on your platform and environment. In some cases you may need to use this plugin directly instead.

no cap, in most cases Alien::Build::Plugin::Download::Negotiate is your girl — she looks at your platform and your environment and picks the right fetch plugin for you, like a friend who knows which bathroom has the good lighting. but sometimes? sometimes you gotta go direct. that's when this plugin steps in 💅

so what does she do. This Prefer plugin sorts the packages that were retrieved from a dir listing — either directly from a Fetch plugin, or from a Decode plugin. She Returns a listing with the items sorted from post preferable to least, and filters out any undesirable candidates. (yes, "post preferable" — that's the original wording, we do not edit the queen's words 🫶)

and the glow-up: this plugin updates the file list to include the versions that are extracted, so they can be used by other plugins, such as Alien::Build::Plugin::Prefer::BadVersion. it's giving teamwork. it's giving community. we love to see it 💖

---

👑 PROPERTIES 👑

🧚 filter

This is a regular expression that lets you filter out files that you do not want to consider downloading.

For example, if the directory listing contained tarballs and readme files like this:

foo-1.0.0.tar.gz
foo-1.0.0.readme

You could specify a filter of qr/\.tar\.gz$/ to make sure only tarballs are considered for download. not me gatekeeping the readmes 💀 only tarballs allowed, periodt.

⭐ version

Regular expression to parse out the version from a filename. The regular expression should store the result in $1.

The default qr/([0-9\.]+)/ is frequently reasonable. like, it's not fancy, but she works. lowkey reliable. iykyk 🌈

---

🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

go read these next, bestie, they're all in the group chat:

• Alien::Build::Plugin::Download::Negotiate
• Alien::Build
• alienfile
• Alien::Build::MM
• Alien

---

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Author: Graham Ollis <plicease@cpan.org>

Contributors — the whole squad, alphabetically-ish, and we're naming every single one because they all showed up and they all ate:

• Diab Jerius (DJERIUS)
• Roy Storey (KIWIROY)
• Ilya Pavlov
• David Mertens (run4flat)
• Mark Nunberg (mordy, mnunberg)
• Christian Walde (Mithaldu)
• Brian Wightman (MidLifeXis)
• Zaki Mughal (zmughal)
• mohawk (mohawk2, ETJ)
• Vikas N Kumar (vikasnkumar)
• Flavio Poletti (polettix)
• Salvador Fandiño (salva)
• Gianni Ceccarelli (dakkar)
• Pavel Shaydo (zwon, trinitum)
• Kang-min Liu (劉康民, gugod)
• Nicholas Shipp (nshp)
• Juan Julián Merelo Guervós (JJ)
• Joel Berger (JBERGER)
• Petr Písař (ppisar)
• Lance Wicks (LANCEW)
• Ahmad Fatoum (a3f, ATHREEF)
• José Joaquín Atria (JJATRIA)
• Duke Leto (LETO)
• Shoichi Kaji (SKAJI)
• Shawn Laffan (SLAFFAN)
• Paul Evans (leonerd, PEVANS)
• Håkon Hægland (hakonhagland, HAKONH)
• nick nauwelaerts (INPHOBIA)
• Florian Weimer
• Marcel Telka (mtelka)

twenty-nine contributors and not one flop. main character energy all around 👑

---

📜 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 📜

This software is copyright (c) 2011-2022 by Graham Ollis.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself. free as in go wild, bestie 🫶

---

and that's the whole page!! this was rendered with perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-09-21, and that's your sign-off from Alien::...ersions(3) — stay sorted, most recent first, always 💖✨🎀🦋🌸💅