Hello Baryuds, I wrote the following program to try to reproduce your problem, but I wasn't able to. I'd suggest you add a line like this to your program, so you can see just how big a number -M is returning:

print "minus M returns: ", (-M $logfile), "\n"; 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $logfile = "file.log";
my $internal = 0;
if ($internal)
{
    # create a logfile
    open LOGFILE, ">$logfile" or die "can't open $logfile: $!";
    print LOGFILE "This is a test\n";
    close LOGFILE or die "can't close $logfile: $!";
}
else
{
    # create logfile externally
    system("./write-log");
}

# sleep?
sleep 3;

print "minus M returns: ", (-M $logfile), "\n";
# test modification time
if (-M $logfile > 0)
{
    print "The logfile generated by 3rd party script is not new\n";
    exit(1);
}
else
{
    print "It's a new logfile! Hoooray!\n";
}

__END__

[download]

In reply to Re: -M file test operator by beable
in thread -M file test operator by bayruds

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