Question

(New to perl)

I’m trying to update an existing perl script to store in a file the last time that it was run, in order to do something “since” that date on the next run.

Is there a safe way to store this in a file that I can then read into a timestamp again?

I’ve found out how to write files

# Open for writing
open(MYFILE,">$filepath/$filename") || "> ERROR: Couldn't open file for writing\n";
print MYFILE $result;
close MYFILE;

And also how to get the time as a string

my ($sec, $min, $hour, $day, $mon, $year) = localtime();
$LAST_RUN_DATETIME=strftime( "%Y/%m/%d %T", $sec, $min, $hour, $day, $mon, $year);

Thanks for your time

Answer 1

I would write something like this probably:

open(my $handle, ">", "$filepath/$filename") or die "Couldn't open $file";
print $handle scalar(localtime());
close($handle);

and to read it in is just:

open(my $handle, "$filepath/$filename") or die "Couldn't open $file";
my $timestamp = <$handle>;

That timestamp will be in this form: (day of the week) mmm (day of the month) hh:mm:ss yyyy