CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellfiledateunix
Hokerie
Hokerie

Reputation: 2595

Print a file's last modified date in Bash

I can't seem to find how to print out the date of a file. I'm so far able to print out all the files in a directory, but I need to print out the dates with it.

I know I need to attach a date format with the echo of the entry, but all I can't find the correct format.

echo "Please type in the directory you want all the files to be listed"

read directory 

for entry in "$directory"/*
do
  echo "$entry"
done

Upvotes: 224

Views: 285816

Answers (11)

1of7
1of7

Reputation: 31

To get the modification date of a file in the format YYYYMMDD_hhmm:

date -r <file> "+%Y%m%d_%H%M"

    20240119_1018

MODDATE=`date -r <file> "+%Y%m%d_%H%M"`

echo $MODDATE

    20240119_1018

This can also be done in a brute force way with

stat -c %y <file>

    2024-01-19 10:18:17.000000000 -0500

stat -c %y <file> | sed "s/^\(....\)-\(..\)-\(..\) \(..\):\(..\).*$/\1\2\3_\4\5/"

    20240119_1018

MODATE=`stat -c %y <file> | sed "s/^\(....\)-\(..\)-\(..\) \(..\):\(..\).*$/\1\2\3_\4\5/"`

echo $MODATE

    20240119_1018

Upvotes: 0

Yoga Nathan
Yoga Nathan

Reputation: 1

You can use:

ls -lrt filename |awk '{printf "%02d",$7}'

This will display the date (a current day of a month) in 2 digits.

If between 1 to 9 it adds "0" prefix to it and converts to 01 - 09.

Hope this meets the expectation.

Upvotes: -2

rishi
rishi

Reputation: 749

Alternatively, you may try also :

date -r filename +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

Upvotes: 34

ton_K
ton_K

Reputation: 99

For the line breaks i edited your code to get something with no line breaks. 

#!/bin/bash
for i in /Users/anthonykiggundu/Sites/rku-it/*; do
   t=$(stat -f "%Sm"  -t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" "$i")
   echo $t : "${i##*/}"  # t only contains date last modified, then only filename 'grokked'- else $i alone is abs. path           
done

Upvotes: 4

mmond
mmond

Reputation: 3853

Isn't the 'date' command much simpler? No need for awk, stat, etc.

date -r <filename>

Also, consider looking at the man page for date formatting; for example with common date and time format:

date -r <filename> "+%m-%d-%Y %H:%M:%S"

Upvotes: 368

Fabien Snauwaert
Fabien Snauwaert

Reputation: 5621

I wanted to get a file's modification date in YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format. Here is how I did it:

date -d @$( stat -c %Y myfile.css ) +%Y%m%d%H%M%S

Explanation. It's the combination of these commands:

stat -c %Y myfile.css # Get the modification date as a timestamp
date -d @1503989421 +%Y%m%d%H%M%S # Convert the date (from timestamp)

Upvotes: 2

Danijel-James W
Danijel-James W

Reputation: 1506

On OS X, I like my date to be in the format of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM in the output for the file.

So to specify a file I would use:

stat -f "%Sm" -t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" [filename]

If I want to run it on a range of files, I can do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
for i in /var/log/*.out; do
  stat -f "%Sm" -t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" "$i"
done

This example will print out the last time I ran the sudo periodic daily weekly monthly command as it references the log files.

To add the filenames under each date, I would run the following instead:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
for i in /var/log/*.out; do
  stat -f "%Sm" -t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" "$i"
  echo "$i"
done

The output would was the following:

2016-40-01 16:40
/var/log/daily.out
2016-40-01 16:40
/var/log/monthly.out
2016-40-01 16:40
/var/log/weekly.out

Unfortunately I'm not sure how to prevent the line break and keep the file name appended to the end of the date without adding more lines to the script.

PS - I use #!/usr/bin/env bash as I'm a Python user by day, and have different versions of bash installed on my system instead of #!/bin/bash

Upvotes: 16

Zombo
Zombo

Reputation: 1

You can use the stat command

stat -c %y "$entry"

More info

%y   time of last modification, human-readable

Upvotes: 174

Hokerie
Hokerie

Reputation: 2595

EDITED: turns out that I had forgotten the quotes needed for $entry in order to print correctly and not give the "no such file or directory" error. Thank you all so much for helping me!

Here is my final code:

    echo "Please type in the directory you want all the files to be listed with last modified dates" #bash can't find file creation dates

read directory

for entry in "$directory"/*

do
modDate=$(stat -c %y "$entry") #%y = last modified. Qoutes are needed otherwise spaces in file name with give error of "no such file"
modDate=${modDate%% *} #%% takes off everything off the string after the date to make it look pretty
echo $entry:$modDate

Prints out like this: 

/home/joanne/Dropbox/cheat sheet.docx:2012-03-14
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp:2013-05-05
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 150 java.zip:2013-02-11
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 151 Java 2.zip:2013-02-11
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 162 Assembly Language.zip:2013-02-11
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 262 Comp Architecture.zip:2012-12-12
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 345 Image Processing.zip:2013-02-11
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 362 Operating Systems:2013-05-05
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 447 Societal Issues.zip:2013-02-11

Upvotes: 2

Bill
Bill

Reputation: 5764

If file name has no spaces:

ls -l <dir> | awk '{print $6, " ", $7, " ", $8, " ", $9 }'

This prints as the following format:

 Dec   21   20:03   a1.out
 Dec   21   20:04   a.cpp

If file names have space (you can use the following command for file names with no spaces too, just it looks complicated/ugly than the former):

 ls -l <dir> | awk '{printf ("%s %s %s ",  $6,  $7, $8); for (i=9;   i<=NF; i++){ printf ("%s ", $i)}; printf ("\n")}'

Upvotes: 5

fotanus
fotanus

Reputation: 20106

Adding to @StevePenny answer, you might want to cut the not-so-human-readable part:

stat -c%y Localizable.strings | cut -d'.' -f1

Upvotes: 7

Related Questions