Checking file Mod date

[LostS]

Hey, OK... lets see I am making this script that is supposed to check a set of files in a directory and check the mod date. If the file has been edited in the last 7 days... Then e-mail it to these people. Now I have the Get the files doing this:

opendir (DIR, '/www/htdocs/data/banner_rev/test');
@list = @pics = grep /\.(txt)/, readdir(DIR);
closedir (DIR);

However I am unclear on how to check the file's mod date... Any suggestions on where to look for this?? Thanks, Billy S.

[HyperZonk]

See the -X functions, in particular -M.

[sifukurt]

Not to complicate matters, but you could also use stat(). Using stat() is particularly useful if you want to see the actual datestamp that the file was last modified, whereas -M only returns the number of days since modification. It is possible to get get the actual datestamp if you've only used -M, but you'd have to use Date::Manip. To do the whole process using stat(), you could do it something like this:


$sevenDays = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7;
$now = time();
foreach $file ( @files ) {
    $mod_time = ( stat($file) )[9];
    if ( $now - $sevenDays < $mod_time ) {
        # Our file has been modified w/i last 7 days
    } else {
        # Hasn't been modified w/i last 7 days
    }
}


It is then a trivial matter to retrieve the exact date of the modification, like so:
$date = localtime( (stat($file) )[9] );
Or, using the first example, since we've already got the modification time stored in $mod_time, we'd simply have to use $date = localtime( $mod_time ).

[Hofmator]

perldoc -f "-X"

-- Hofmator

[LostS]

Does anyone have an example on how to use this function...
Like what is the output? How will it display the last mod date??

[Hofmator]

The -M filetest operator gives the number of days since modification since startup of the script, so:

my $age = -M $file;
if ($age < 7) {
  # do something
}

# or directly
if (-M $file < 7) {
  # do something
}

-- Hofmator

[kebex]

You probably want the stat() command.