UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi

When i do ls -ltr <file1> then it shows me the date and time of the file
if - for whatever reason file has future date/time stamp then ls -ltr is not showing the time, it just shows only date part ... even if time is ahead by 2 hr than current time.

suppose a file was copied from INDIA server to USA server (preserving the date/time stamp of original file) then we are not able to see the time of file using ls -ltr command

is there any way to find it ?

1. touch -t 1012222200 test (touch a file with 2010 12 22 22:00 when current time is 2010 12 22 2030)
2. ls -ltr test just shows the date - Dec 22 2010 test

Since unix uses Epoch time ( the number of non-leap seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970 ) it is quite normal on a same box...(Future is not yet written in history...).
Now if you have this sort of issue, IMHO either you have a bug in your copy/transfer application either a box has the wrong time set (They should all be using UTC and use TZ for local time).
But I might be wrong...

Use perl:

Code:

$ date
Thu Dec 23 10:12:48 EST 2010
$ touch file.now
$ perl -e '@d=localtime ((stat(shift))[9]); printf "%02d-%02d-%04d %02d:%02d:%02d\n", $d[3],$d[4]+1,$d[5]+1900,$d[2],$d[1],$d[0]' file.now
23-12-2010 10:12:51

Recent GNU versions of 'ls' have the option '--full-time' which will provide output like:

-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 0 2010-12-23 22:00:00.000000000 -0800 testfile