Displaying Last modification date

Question

I need to display file’s name, size, number of hard links, owner, and modify date (in that order).

#!/bin/csh

echo Enter file name
set filename = $<

if(-f $filename)then

    if(-z $filename)then
      rm $filename
    else 
      clear

      echo $filename
      stat -c %s $filename
      stat -c %h $filename
      stat -c %U $filename
      stat -c %y $filename

    endif
endif

Everything works (I think) except it shows more than just the date. What command would I use to just display the date of last modification?

Answer 1

It seems you are looking for this:

stat -c %y $filename

Or this:

date -r $filename

Or this (most portable):

fn=$filename perl -e 'print scalar localtime((stat("$ENV{fn}"))[9])'

On the other hand, stat -c %y was already in your post, and you wrote:

Everything works (I think) except it shows more than just the date. What command would I use to just display the date of last modification?

Which makes me think that perhaps you want only the date part? One (lazy) solution for that is using shell commands like cut, awk, sed to extract just what you need, for example:

$ stat -c %y sample.txt
2013-10-12 09:24:08.096820646 -0700
$ stat -c %y sample.txt | cut -f1 -d' '
2013-10-12

A better solution is to generate dates in the desired format, but that depends on the command you used. For example stat cannot do this, but date and perl can, for example:

date +%Y-%m-%d -r $filename

Answer 2

See the man stat.

You need to use a, m, c or B which gives the time file was last accessed or modified.