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How do I get a file's timestamp in perl?

Jasmine
Administrator

Jan 26, 2001, 10:27 AM

Post #1 of 1 (1761 views)

How do I get a file's timestamp in perl?	Can't Post

(From the Perl FAQ)

How do I get a file's timestamp in perl?

If you want to retrieve the time at which the file was last read, written, or had its meta-data (owner, etc) changed, you use the -M, -A, or -C filetest operations as documented in the perlfunc manpage. These retrieve the age of the file (measured against the start-time of your program) in days as a floating point number. To retrieve the ``raw'' time in seconds since the epoch, you would call the stat function, then use localtime(), gmtime(), or POSIX::strftime() to convert this into human-readable form.

Here's an example:

Code

    $write_secs = (stat($file))[9]; 
    printf "file %s updated at %s\n", $file, 
        scalar localtime($write_secs);

If you prefer something more legible, use the File::stat module (part of the standard distribution in version 5.004 and later):

Code

    use File::stat; 
    use Time::localtime; 
    $date_string = ctime(stat($file)->mtime); 
    print "file $file updated at $date_string\n";

Error checking is left as an exercise for the reader.

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