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

I can get the Last Modification date on http page but not on a FTP page. Please advise if there is another method I can use to fetch Last Modification date on ftp web sites? 
use LWP::Simple;
use strict;
use warnings;

my $url = 'http://site/toyota.htm';
my ($lastMod) = (head($url))[2];  #This does work

my $url2 = 'ftp://ftp.thesite.com/public/information/';
my ($lastMod2) = (head($url2))[2];  #This doesnt work

print "$lastMod\n";  #Prints last mod date
print "$lastMod2\n";  #Prints nothing

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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Last Modification date
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 09, 2003 at 11:58 UTC
    While HTTP allows for a Last-Modified date header to be send, it's not required, and it's also not required to be the third line of the response, so I wouldn't say "# This does work". It's more "# It might work, sometimes, for some URLs".

    However, the FTP protocol doesn't send a Last-Modified piece of meta data, so you can't get it in the way you are trying. You *might* be able to get the information by using Net::FTP to log in to the server, cd to the appropriate directory, and issue a 'dir' command. You might be able to parse out the last modification date from the response - but then again, the server might not give it to you.

    It's important to realize that HTTP and FTP are two very different protocols.

    Abigail

[reply]

      If you decide to go by the Net::FTP method here are somethings that might help you.

      And as Abigail-II says 'you might be able to get this information if your FTP server decides so'

      -T

      use perl; use strict;

[reply]
      Thanks for the explanation.
[reply]

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