Remote file stats ...

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello, I'm trying to get stats on remote files hosted on another domain. Specifically, I would like to retrieve a time stamp for the last modified or last access date. This is so I can rank documents by update or access time. Can this be done in Perl? Please advise o great ones.

Comment on Remote file stats ...

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Re: Remote file stats ... by cjf (Parson) on Mar 07, 2002 at 03:54 UTC
You can get the last modified time (and a bunch of other stuff) on a remote file using the head() method of LWP::Simple like so... `use LWP::Simple; my $url = "http://www.perlmonks.org/yourfile"; my ($content_type, $document_length, $modified_time, $expires, $server +) = head($url);` [download] Docs for LWP::Simple are here	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Remote file stats ... by beppu (Hermit) on Mar 07, 2002 at 03:56 UTC
Using the `HEAD` command that comes with LWP, you can make a HEAD HTTP request which might send back a `Last-Modified` header. For example (from the shell): `% HEAD http://ax9.org/index.htm 200 OK Connection: close Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 04:03:14 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes ETag: "9046a85-233-3c64116d" Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) mod_perl/1.26 mod_ssl/2.8.5 OpenSSL/0.9.6 +b Content-Length: 563 Content-Type: text/html Last-Modified: Fri, 08 Feb 2002 17:57:01 GMT Client-Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 04:03:14 GMT Client-Response-Num: 1 %` [download]	[reply] [d/l]