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

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

6 comments. Current rating: 5 stars

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Question:

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

Answer:

For clean code, it is recommended to use File::stat module which is part of the standard distribution in version 5.004 and later.

Use method mtime() to get the last modification time. This is the time the file itself was modified last.

Instead you can also use stat.ctime which is the time directory information about the file was changed, not the file itself.

stat.atime is the last time the file was accessed.


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

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Comments:

2007-03-28, 05:48:13

anonymous

Appear to work only for Local files? How about remote server files?

2009-04-20, 08:45:43

anonymous

How do i edit the timestamps of files in sm_tomcat.log withouth affecting the server time?

2009-05-22, 17:35:21

anonymous from United States

Thank You

2009-11-18, 06:42:19 (updated: 2009-11-18, 06:43:08)

anonymous

Doesn't appear to work. Cannot call method mtime on an undefined value

2010-01-21, 18:04:14

anonymous from United Kingdom

You need to define $file:

use File::stat;
use Time::localtime;

$file = '/etc/issue';
$datetime_string = ctime(stat($file)->mtime);

print 'file $file was updated at $datetime_string\n';

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