Question

I am trying to get a time stamp and convert it to the format - YYYYMMDD. I don't know how to get the date without using stat and I can't install stat because it is a company server. I have looked around but it seems everyone would use stat.

Was it helpful?

Solution

If you can't use GNU stat, maybe you can sneak under the radar and use Perl's stat :-)

perl -MPOSIX -e 'print POSIX::strftime "%Y%m%d\n", localtime((stat $ARGV[0])[9])' yourfile

Result:

20140303

Many thanks to Glenn Jackman (see Comments below) for magnificently filling the role of "clever person" and showing me where I was going wrong. Thank you.

OTHER TIPS

 ls -l --time-style="+%Y%m%d" filename

Expanding from Amit's answer to just return the timestamp

ls -l --time-style="+%Y%m%d" ./filename |cut -d " " -f 6
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