Print a file s last modified date in Bash

Question

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

User · Answer

You can use   ls -lrt filename  awk   print   02d   7     This will display the date in 2 digits   If between 1 to 9 it adds  0  prefix to it and converts to 01 - 09    Hope this meets the expectation

User · Answer

Best is  date -r filename    Y- m- d  H  M  S

User · Answer

If file name has no spaces   ls -l  lt dir gt    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  lt dir gt    awk   printf    s  s  s      6    7   8   for  i 9    i lt  NF  i     printf    s     i    printf    n

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Adding to  StevePenny answer  you might want to cut the not-so-human-readable part   stat -c y Localizable strings   cut -d    -f1

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

You can use the stat command  stat -c  y   entry    More info    y   time of last modification  human-readable

User · Answer

Isn t the  date  command much simpler   No need for awk  stat  etc   date -r  lt filename gt    Also  consider looking at the man page for date formatting  for example with common date and time format   date -r  lt filename gt     m- d- Y  H  M  S

[bash] Print a file's last modified date in Bash

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