Coding School

Problem

You want to view seconds since last change or use Perl to process a number of files.

Or maybe you just want a programmatic way to deal with file details, using something similar to the UNIX stat C routine.

Solution

Run stat against a file and display inode change time since epoch. See my other tip on converting to local time.

Example

Excellent for showing the exact time in seconds, since the last change.

Rather than the normal hours and minutes from ls.

Replace /tmp/js with filename.

$ perl -e '$ctime=(stat("/tmp/js"))[10];print("$ctime\n");'
1181102779

Reference

Technorati Tags: Perl file handling, Perl stat, UNIX stat, Perl Coding School

• Perl Docs – stat
• Date handling in Perl – localtime