How to get the date of a file?

New to Julia
1

Hello,

I’m very new to Julia. I try to get the last updated date of a list of file, for that I use the method “mtime”. The result for some files is correct but unfortunately for many I get always that date : 1970-01-01T00:00:00

Do you know why I got this result? Is there another approach to get the date of the file?

Regards,

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2

Dates.unix2datetime(mtime(filename)) should work to get the modification date and time of a file, I think?

for many I get always that date : 1970-01-01T00:00:00

Maybe you are just passing an incorrect filename (or an incorrect path)? mtime returns 0.0 for files that don’t exist, which corresponds to the Unix epoch of January 1, 1970.

5 Likes
3

But why not error or missing/NaN/nothing ?

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4

This is a good question. Linux distributions (often) provide the stat command which has -c FORMAT flag and a %W time of file birth, seconds since Epoch; 0 if unknown format specification. So I would suppose it comes from there, but calling stat -c "%W" file_that_does_not_exist returns an error in my distribution (Arch Linux), so I am not sure why this decision was taken. Maybe opening a bug report is the best decision.

5

Hello Stevengj,

Many thanks for you reply, it helped me a lot.

Here is my code before the fix:

 for (root, dirs, files) in walkdir(".")
   
    for file in files
      
      filePath = joinpath(root, file);

      fileExtension = splitext(filePath)[2];

      if(fileExtension == ".txt")
      
        lastUpdatedTime = Dates.unix2datetime(stat(file).mtime);

        daysDifference = Dates.value(round(today - lastUpdatedTime, Dates.Day(1)));

        if(daysDifference >= daysLimit)
        
          println("File : " , filePath , " - Date : ", lastUpdatedTime , " - Days Difference : ", daysDifference);

        end

      end


    end

  end

After your reply, I changed this line:

lastUpdatedTime = Dates.unix2datetime(stat(file).mtime);

to

lastUpdatedTime = Dates.unix2datetime(stat(filePath).mtime);

And now I get the correct last updated date of each file.

Best Regards,

6

Here’s a generic 1-line solution to the question posed:

folder = “/path/to/directory”
last_modified = Dates.unix2datetime.(mtime.(joinpath.(folder,readdir(folder))))