#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
#use diagnostics;
use warnings;
use POSIX;

my $file = $ARGV[0] || 'a.pl';
my @t = stat($file);

print "Accessed: ", strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y, %H:%M:%S",localtime($t[8]
+)), "\n";
print "Modified: ", strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y, %H:%M:%S",localtime($t[9]
+)), "\n";
print "Created: ", strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y, %H:%M:%S",localtime($t[10]
+)), "\n";
[download]

Update: added dir and last modified above, emphasized 'on Win32'

Update 2.5: Okay, thunders made me curious. I dug into the perl source. Perl's stat (built with Visual C) is implemented using the stat or wstat function. According to MS, these functions return st_ctime, which is the "Time of creation of file. Valid on NTFS but not on FAT formatted disk drives." This is what stat[10] returns.

Also, if you move a file across file systems (from c: to d:, for example) the creation time changes.

stat[10] is ctime which is literally inode change time. Thing is, in my test at least on Windows this appears to return creation time. On Unix something as simple as moving a file will update this value, as will security related changes like chgrp. not the case on Windows, the value stays the same, and appears to be the actual file creation time.

Thanks very much.

Im going to write to p5p to see if this is considered a feature and if so ill provide them a patch for the documentation.

Yves / DeMerphq
---
Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.

How can I SET the values discussed here using Perl, e.g. if I move a file from one partition to another but want it to have the original (file's) time stamp?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Win32::API;
use Win32API::File (qw/:ALL/);

my $filename = "file.txt";
my $GetFileTime = new Win32::API("kernel32", "GetFileTime", ['N', 'P',
+ 'P', 'P' ], 'I');

my $hFile= CreateFile( $filename,  GENERIC_READ(), FILE_SHARE_READ(), 
                        [], OPEN_EXISTING() , 0, []) or  die "Can't re
+ad file $filename";



my %filetime =( create=>undef,access=>undef,write=>undef );

for (keys %filetime) {    
    $filetime{$_} = pack("LL", 0, 0); 
}


$GetFileTime->Call($hFile,$filetime{'create'},$filetime{'access'},$fil
+etime{'write'});


for  (keys %filetime) {
        my $filetimepointer = $filetime{$_};
        my $systemtime = pack("SSSSSSSS",0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0);
        my $FileToSystem = new Win32::API("kernel32", "FileTimeToSyste
+mTime", ['P','P'] , 'I');
        $FileToSystem->Call($filetimepointer,$systemtime);
        my($year,$month,$weekday,$day,$hour,$minute,$second,$msecond) 
+= unpack("SSSSSSSS",$systemtime);
        printf ("$_ time:\t %d/%02d/%02d %02d:%02d:%02d", $month, $day
+, $year ,$hour,$minute,$second);
        print "\n";
}
[download]

Wow.

Thanks a lot thunders!

+++++

Yves / DeMerphq
---
Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.