Question

Is there any handy functions can retrieve timestamp from given files or even compare them? My ideal usage would be like this:

time_diff = date(file_path_a) - date(file_path_b) # time_diff would be a formatted string such as 2days 3hrs 16 mins

I know there is a built-in datetime module in python, but I haven’t found anything similar to my usage. And I know I can achieve similar effect by issuing os.stat(file_path) to get the timestamp, and transform them to the format I want. Just wondering if there are any more handy function to do this.

Answer 1

import datetime, os
def mtime(filename):
    return datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.stat(filename).st_mtime)
time_diff = mtime(file_path_a) - mtime(file_path_b)

… and then format the resulting datetime.timedelta object in the desired way.