File stat problem

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

Hi all,

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I have checked Q&A and can't seem to find where I'm going wrong.

I am using stat to return the 'mtime' for a files in a given Win32 directory. I want to ensure that no file in the directory is older than 20min.

I'm getting some strange results...

use strict;
my $mytime=(time);
my ($File,$FileStat,$CallOutDir);

opendir(CallOut, $CallOutDir) || die "$!\n";
foreach $File (readdir(CallOut)) {
    next if $File=~/^\./;
    if ($FileStat = (stat $File)[9]){
        if ($FileStat <= ($mytime - 1200)) {
        print "File older than 20min found. The file name is $File");
        #send mail here....
        last;
        }
    }
}
[download]

Please help o suppliers of wisdom.

Thanks, Smaug.

Comment on File stat problem Download Code

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Re: File stat problem by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Feb 26, 2004 at 13:48 UTC
`if ($FileStat = (stat $File)[9]){` [download] Are you sure your current working directory is `$CallOutDir`? Else, you might want to change that line to `if ($FileStat = (stat "$CallOutDir/$File") [9]) {` [download] Abigail	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: File stat problem by Smaug (Pilgrim) on Feb 26, 2004 at 13:57 UTC
That's it!!! AAARRRRRGGGG!!! Thanks a million!	[reply]
Re: File stat problem by ambrus (Abbot) on Feb 26, 2004 at 15:02 UTC
Instead of the stat and time functions, you can just use the -M function that tells you the age of a file in days, as a floating point number. That's a bit more convenient.	[reply]
Re: File stat problem by maa (Pilgrim) on Feb 26, 2004 at 13:41 UTC
Hi... you're comparing `$mtime` with itself minus 1200... perhaps you want `my $now=time();` somewhere :-) HTH - Mark	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: File stat problem by Smaug (Pilgrim) on Feb 26, 2004 at 13:45 UTC
Hi, I left out the following top section of the code....sorry!!! `use strict; my $mytime=(time); my ($File,$FileStat,$CallOutDir);` [download] Cheers, Smaug.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: File stat problem by derby (Abbot) on Feb 26, 2004 at 13:43 UTC
What are the strange results? (Besides the unbalanced paren on the print line which I'm assuming was just a mistake). -derby	[reply]
Re: Re: File stat problem by Smaug (Pilgrim) on Feb 26, 2004 at 13:52 UTC
Hi, Yip, the ')' is as a result of some fat fingers and non-existant typing skills. The results are mixed, at first I was getting only the first file older than 20min returned. After that the script stopped. I found that '$FileStat' was empty. I made some changes, and now even though there are files that are 3 weeks old, it does not find any. Thanks, Smaug.	[reply]
Re: File stat problem by TomDLux (Vicar) on Feb 26, 2004 at 17:42 UTC
While it has nothing to do with the problem you are experiencing, there are some oddities in your code. I wonder if there are reasons why you are doing them. `my $mytime = (time);` [download] `time()` returns a scalar, which you are assigning to a scalar. Why do you place it inside a list? Invoking array context makes no difference in the return value. Or were you intending to have the parentheses at the end, indicating a function call with no parameters, as in `my $mytime = time();` [download] `if ($FileStat = (stat $File)[9]){` [download] Why do you have the `stat` return value as the condition of an `if`? Or was that part of your debugging, trying to figure out the odd results you were getting. I would suggest verifying each file exists, if you have any doubt or want to be robust, and then confidently and boldly getting and using it's mtime. -- `TTTATCGGTCGTTATATAGATGTTTGCA`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: File stat problem by ambrus (Abbot) on Feb 27, 2004 at 20:38 UTC
`my $mytime = (time);` does not imply array context for time, only `my ($mytime)= time;` or `(my $mytime)= time` would do that.	[reply] [d/l] [select]