Thanks for the help. I've been looking through my books and newsgroup postings for three days and get the answer here in a matter of minutes. I had tried file modification time and it hadn't worked either. The os is unix. japhy's answer of stat "reports/$filename" did the trick.

In reply to Re: Why does stat work sporadically? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Why does stat work sporadically? by Anonymous Monk

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