Edit a file without changing the modtime

Blosxom dates entries by file modification times, which really sucks if I want to update a post but leave the time as it is. It may have some plugin or entries file or other gizmo to maintain the modification times of each entry, but I wanted something that didn't make me break my blosxom installation, install something new, or change what I was doing.

So, I just wrapped a call to the editor in a little Perl script that remembers the modification time, edits the file, and resets the time when it's done.

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $time = -e $ARGV[0] ? (stat $ARGV[0])[9] : time;

system '/usr/bin/pico', $ARGV[0];

utime $time, $time, $ARGV[0];
[download]

No big whoop, or maybe merely a "Almost cool" use of perl: just something I should have done a while ago.

--
brian d foy <bdfoy@cpan.org>

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Re: Edit a file without changing the modtime by johnnywang (Priest) on Dec 08, 2004 at 09:24 UTC
That's cool. I had the same problem with Blosxom, and I kept a (relatively small) set of timestamps in a simple bash script, and simply "touch" everything with it. I found it's quite convenient to cheat the date, or re-arrange the blogs to fill up some lazy periods (barring straight links.)	[reply]
Re: Edit a file without changing the modtime by kelan (Deacon) on Dec 08, 2004 at 13:30 UTC
Gasp! brian_d_foy uses pico?? ;-)	[reply]
Re^2: Edit a file without changing the modtime by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Dec 08, 2004 at 19:48 UTC
I use pico to edit blosxom entries and write mail (since it's the editor behind PINE). I like it much better for creating paragraphs and sentences and such. If I'm editing at a terminal for anything else, it's a vi variant. For some stuff for The Perl Review, I use TextEdit because I need RTF, and I only need to write a screenful. But what I really use is BBEdit. What I really don't use is emacs. Randal does everything in emacs and constantly talks about how he'd like to dump Mac OS X and let emacs do everything. Okay, maybe he doesn't say that, but I know he's thinking it. -- brian d foy <bdfoy@cpan.org>	[reply]
Re^3: Edit a file without changing the modtime by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Dec 20, 2004 at 09:33 UTC
Well, Emacs is a nice [and we all know how the rest goes]. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]
Re^2: Edit a file without changing the modtime by Grygonos (Chaplain) on Dec 08, 2004 at 15:17 UTC
if you take pico to colorado and colorado to las palmas.. that's how you get to "llama" school... fairly prophetic i think. Grygonos	[reply]
Re: Edit a file without changing the modtime by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Dec 08, 2004 at 17:52 UTC
Cool++ (also could have used that and probably will). Related is a trick I picked up for `-pi` style edits: in-place edit preserving file modification times. `my $horn = Shame->new('none'); $horn->toot;`	[reply] [d/l] [select]