Question

I am writing a manifest.xml file during an Ant build for an OpenCMS project.

I need to be able to pull up a file’s create date, and last modified date on a file. (Although the current process is giving each file a timestamp of Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 EST anyway — at least on Windows machines when they run the build.)

Is there a way I can pull up the creation date timestamp of a file in Ant? I’m using standard Ant tasks and Ant-Contrib tasks.

Answer 1

It depends on your OS, f.e. Unix doesn’t store the file creation time, see details here
Two possible solutions :

Solution 1, works on Windows only with Java >= 6, no addons needed

<project>
  <!-- Works on Windows only, uses the jdk builtin
       rhino javascript engine (since jdk6)
       use dir command without /T:C to get lastmodificationtime
  -->
  <macrodef name="getFileTimes">
    <attribute name="dir" />
    <attribute name="file" />
    <attribute name="setprop" default="@{file}_ctime" />
    <sequential>
      <exec executable="cmd" dir="@{dir}" outputproperty="@{setprop}">
        <arg value="/c" />
        <arg line="dir @{file} /T:C|find ' @{file}'" />
      </exec>
      <script language="javascript">
     tmp = project.getProperty("@{setprop}").split("\\s+") ;
     project.setProperty("@{setprop}", tmp[0] + "/" + tmp[1]) ;
   </script>
    </sequential>
  </macrodef>

  <getFileTimes dir="C:/tmp" file="bookmarks.html" />

  <echo>
  $${bookmarks.html_ctime} => ${bookmarks.html_ctime}
  </echo>
</project>

Solution 2, needs Java 7 and groovy-all-x.x.x.jar (contained in groovy binary release)
Adjust the SimpleDateFormat to your liking.
On Unix filesystems when asking for creationtime you’ll get the last modification time.

<project>
  <taskdef name="groovy" classname="org.codehaus.groovy.ant.Groovy"/>

  <!-- Solution for Java 7, uses the nio package
       needs groovy-all-2.1.0.jar
  -->
  <macrodef name="getFileTimes">
    <attribute name="file"/>
    <attribute name="ctimeprop" default="@{file}_ctime"/>
    <attribute name="mtimeprop" default="@{file}_mtime"/>
    <sequential>
      <groovy>
      import java.nio.file.*
      import java.nio.file.attribute.*
      import java.text.*
      import java.util.date.*

      Path path = Paths.get("@{file}")
      BasicFileAttributeView view = Files.getFileAttributeView(path, BasicFileAttributeView.class)
      BasicFileAttributes attributes = view.readAttributes()
      lastModifiedTime = attributes.lastModifiedTime()
      createTime = attributes.creationTime()
      DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm:ss", Locale.US)
      df.format(new Date(createTime.toMillis()))

      properties.'@{ctimeprop}' = df.format(new Date(createTime.toMillis()))
      properties.'@{mtimeprop}' = df.format(new Date(lastModifiedTime.toMillis()))
     </groovy>
    </sequential>
  </macrodef>

  <getFileTimes file="C:/tmp/bookmarks.html"/>

  <echo>
    $${C:/tmp/bookmarks.html_ctime} => ${C:/tmp/bookmarks.html_ctime}
    $${C:/tmp/bookmarks.html_mtime} => ${C:/tmp/bookmarks.html_mtime}
  </echo>
</project>

I tried also using the builtin javascript engine, but i got errors like :

sun.org.mozilla.javascript.internal.EvaluatorException: missing name after . operator

IMO, for simple things using javascript <script language="javascript"> is sufficient, but if you need to import java packages etc. .. it’s a PITA. Groovy simply works.