Both of those commands will only work with GNU/Linux tools.
Quote:
You seem to have a minimal system... something like a standalone busybox.
It lacks many things. You have to try and find what works.
unankix ought to answer your question and let us know which operating system is in use.
More likely, it's a full-fledged UNIX (perhaps Solaris), just not GNU/Linux. Compared to GNU, most UNIX versions of the standard tools are spartan.
The POSIX date command only supports one option, -u. On BSD systems, there is a -r option, but it does not take a file argument.
The stat command isn't even part of any standard, so it can vary a great deal from one UNIX system to another (if it's even there). On a BSD-ish system, stat doesn't support a -c option, but similar functionality is implemented with -f. However, you cannot simply change -c into -f because the format specifying arguments work differently.
The world is a much simpler place if you only have to work with one UNIX flavor, but, if you're interested in knowing how your tools compare to a portable baseline, the POSIX manual pages will be of use to you:
Utilities
On an unrelated note, it's also a good idea to double quote,
"$item", to protect the result of parameter expansion from further expansion (namely, file globbing), since we don't know anything about any constraints on the pathnames.
Regards,
Alister