Fetching Properties info from a word document.

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

I have document files on my Windows 2000 that gives the file creation date in the "Date of Creation" part of the Properties Summary area of each document. I was hoping to write a Perl script to get this data. Please advise where this info is stored on a Windows 2000???

Perl has a stat function that will give me the access and modification date BUT not the creation date. Now that I see I can get that creation date in the Properties (under Summary, then click on "Origin" then it shows "Date of Creation") section of Word Documents I was wondering how I can get this info. Where is it stored so I can fetch it with perl script??

Comment on Fetching Properties info from a word document.

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Re: Fetching Properties info from a word document. by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Aug 20, 2002 at 16:16 UTC
In a Word Document, it uses the COM "Compound Document File", and these properties are part of that file format. You might look at IPropertySetStorage in a OLE book. Also, the Word document model might support getting this value directly. —John	[reply]
Re: Fetching Properties info from a word document. by grummerX (Pilgrim) on Aug 20, 2002 at 16:16 UTC
The ctime value from stat does give you the file creation time on Windows, but not on Unix filesystems -- in their case ctime returns the inode change time rather than the file creation time. For example, this script prints out its own creation time: `#!perl -w use strict; use POSIX; my $file = $0; print strftime "Created: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", localtime ((stat $file)[1 +0]);` [download] -- grummerX	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Fetching Properties info from a word document. by mjeaton (Hermit) on Aug 20, 2002 at 14:53 UTC
See Win32::OLE mike	[reply]