in reply to Re^2: Getting the Access Date of a file without changing it
in thread Getting the Access Date of a file without changing it

One other little nit-pick: if you ever end up doing this on a lot of files (e.g. as returned by File::Find or readdir), it will go noticeably quicker using the "_" (underscore) as a placeholder for "last file stat'ed" -- i.e.:
use strict; my $file = shift; if ( ! -e $file ) { die "no file" } my $age = -A _; # re-use the stat done by "-e" above if ( -d _ ) { print "directory\n" } elsif ( -T _ ) { print "probably a text file\n" } else { print "probably a binary file\n" } print "Before being read just now, $file was last read ", scalar localtime( $^T - $age*24*3600 ); # $age is in days, so multply to get seconds, subtract from # script's start-time to get original file access time, use # "scalar localtime" to print that in human-readable form
Note that there may be limits to the reliability of the "-T" (and "-B") tests: they base their decision on reading just the first block or so of a file, but some files that seem to start with text data may contain "binary" (non-text) data later on... It can be a fuzzy distinction in any case.