Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I just need to know way of getting date of file when it was created.
eg i have a file abc created on 23 aug. Now i need to know date of file i.e. 23 aug. How can i get that data.


Thanks
Sarbjit

I hope you are using linux ... if yes then try this

file=abc
date --date=$(stat -c%y $file | cut -c1-10) +"%d %b"

else ... let the forum know ...

Thanks for your reply but i want to know date for a particular file. Actually my task is that i want to know whether after performing a set of operations a file is modified or not. So in your code you haven't mention file name.

*** EDITED ***

$ file=abc
... is where I am setting the file name
$date --date=$(stat -c%y $file | cut -c1-10) +"%d %b"

Now inthis command stat will get me all the details about the file ... Since you wanted the file date and month so I have given the above ... You need to modify to fit your needs...

The code could be like

#!/bin/bash
file="/path/to/abc" # setting file name here
BEFORE=`stat -c%y $file`

# ... Your set of tasks here

AFTER=`stat -c%y $file`

if [ "$BEFORE" -eq "$AFTER" ];
then
echo "Your set task failed"
else
echo "Your set task did some changes to file $file"
fi

echo "End of program.. Enjoy"

There is no creation date available as far as I know unless you log the file creation date in a script. But you can use the stat to get the time stamp for last access, last change and last modification time. For example:

Code:

$ stat --printf "Last access: %x\nLast modification: %y\nLast change %z\n" your.file

if u just wanna know creation date den i think its enough
ls -l <filename> it shows everyting....

that's not correct, it will only shows if the file hasn't been modified.