Checking if file has been modified in last 7 days using stat [9]

drock has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

ok perl'ers... I want to stat a file and element 9 I am interested in. But this returns since epoch so how can I say "check to see if file was modified +7 days or 60*60*24*7? thanks, derek


snip....

my @info = (stat ($tapes))[9];
print "@info\n";
[download]

Edit by BazB: change title from "stat [9]".

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Re: Checking if file has been modified in last 7 days using stat [9] by Tanktalus (Canon) on Mar 17, 2005 at 23:47 UTC
In the spirit of TMTOWTDI ... and in the spirit of "How do I do X with Y", I present: "How do I do X ... with X?": `my @info = stat $tapes; print 'this file hasn't been modified in a while' if -M _ > 7;` [download] The -M function was written specifically for this - as long as you have a short-running script. That's becasue -M compares the modification time to the time that your script started. If you have something running in a persistant environment (e.g., mod_perl), this is probably not what you want. Cron jobs, however, would be somewhere that this just makes things easier.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Checking if file has been modified in last 7 days using stat by BazB (Priest) on Mar 17, 2005 at 22:51 UTC
I'm not going to give you the code, but the method should be something like: Get current time since epoch (hint: time()) Get mtime of file in question, since epoch Check if current time minus mtime is less or more than the number of seconds in 7 days. If the information in this post is inaccurate, or just plain wrong, don't just downvote - please post explaining what's wrong. That way everyone learns.	[reply]
Re: Checking if file has been modified in last 7 days using stat by friedo (Prior) on Mar 17, 2005 at 22:54 UTC
First, since you're only getting one element from `stat`, you might as well stick it in a scalar instead of an array. To see if a file was modified more than seven days ago, just get the current time and compare. `my $mtime = (stat $tapes)[9]; my $now = time; if( $mtime < ( $now - 604800) ) { print "$tapes is more than seven days old.\n"; }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]