softworkz:

On a *nix system, you can use stat to get the UID (user ID) of the file, and cross reference it with /etc/passwd to match it to the user.

For a windows system, I found this link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/218965. It contains some sample VB code that you should be able to translate to perl. Though you'll have to define the DLL references & such.

Update: I also found a bit of perl at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4677180/how-to-get-file-owner-name.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

It sounds (from the terms being used) like you are on a Windows system. If, however, you are on a unix system, you should be aware of a few things.

This only works (under unix) if the OS captures extended usage logs, or the edit method creates a new file. An append or a open+trunc+write does not change ownership of the file.

usera$ grep groupa /etc/group
groupa::1000:usera,userb

usera$ touch foo
usera$ chgrp groupa foo
usera$ sudo chown userb foo
usera$ ls -l foo
-rw-rw-r--  1 userb ... foo

usera$ echo Hello World > foo
usera$ ls -l foo
-rw-rw-r--  1 userb ... foo
[download]

That is not saying that it cannot be done, just that classical unix will not give the correct expected answers in all cases.

On a system with chown for non-superuser privileges, there are even more assumptions being made.

What do you mean by "file"? Just a file on a (Unix-like) filesystem? If so, Perl's stat function returns a whole bunch of statistics on files, including the numeric user ID of the file's owner. The getpwuid function can convert that to the user name.

Most VCS (Version Control Systems, or revision control, or whatever you want to call them) keep track of who made a commit. Git allows each user to configure a username, and an email address. Each git commit records the commit's author.

I can't imagine a website with 350 files not using version control in 2012, so you probably just need to look at your commit history, and therein you'll find your answer. You are using version control, aren't you?

What type of files are you tracking? Are you tracking Office files? What about PDF files? Or are you tracking any file submitted?

To track Office (2007=<) files you can query the internal XML file (docProp -> core.xml) for the lastModifiedBy and dcterms:modified flags. This will give you the date of modification and the actual name of the person you modified the file, not just the name of the person who uploaded the file to the CMS. These properties are st every time the file is touched.

PDF files also have a document properties that can be queried by PDF::API2 using the $pdf->info(%infohash) function. Most of these properties have to be set when you create the document.