Question

Suppose I have a filehandle $fh. I can check its existence with -e $fh or its file size with -s $fh or a slew of additional information about the file. How can I get its last modified time stamp?

Answer 1

Calling the built-in function stat($fh) returns an array with the following information about the file handle passed in (from the perlfunc man page for stat):

  0 dev      device number of filesystem   1 ino      inode number   2 mode     file mode  (type and permissions)   3 nlink    number of (hard) links to the file   4 uid      numeric user ID of file's owner   5 gid      numeric group ID of file's owner   6 rdev     the device identifier (special files only)   7 size     total size of file, in bytes   8 atime    last access time since the epoch   9 mtime    last modify time since the epoch  10 ctime    inode change time (NOT creation time!) since the epoch  11 blksize  preferred block size for file system I/O  12 blocks   actual number of blocks allocated 

Element number 9 in this array will give you the last modified time since the epoch (00:00 January 1, 1970 GMT). From that you can determine the local time:

my $epoch_timestamp = (stat($fh))[9]; my $timestamp       = localtime($epoch_timestamp); 

Alternatively, you can use the built-in module File::stat (included as of Perl 5.004) for a more object-oriented interface.

And to avoid the magic number 9 needed in the previous example, additionally use Time::localtime, another built-in module (also included as of Perl 5.004). Together these lead to some (arguably) more legible code:

use File::stat; use Time::localtime; my $timestamp = ctime(stat($fh)->mtime);