thx for ur help . i am able to get the mtime of the files . i am taking input from user in dd/mm/yyyy format and i am using ParseDateString($string1) to get the epoch time but the problem is that the output in this case is 2005090100:00:00 while the epoch for the same file is 1105215157. do i need to use a different function to get input dates into epoch secs.