Hi Bayruds, here is a program to find out how old the log file actually is. It turns out that we are talking about 1 to 9 seconds old. Is that too old for you? If that seems like a reasonable age, I'd suggest you change your "-M" test line to something like: 

# see if the file is more than about one hour old
if (-M $logfile > 0.042) { ... }

[download]

Here's the program. Somebody will probably produce a one-liner to do this now. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $secs_per_day = 60 * 60 * 24;
while (my $line = <DATA>)
{
    chomp $line;
    if ($line =~ m/MTIME:\s+(.*)/)
    {
        my $time = $1;
        my $secs = $time * $secs_per_day;
        print "$time days is $secs second(s)\n";
    }
}

__END__

Output:
1.15740740740741e-05 days is 1 second(s)
0.000104166666666667 days is 9.00000000000003 second(s)


__DATA__
MTIME: 1.15740740740741e-05
MTIME: 0.000104166666666667

[download]

In reply to Re^3: -M file test operator by beable
in thread -M file test operator by bayruds

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