[windows] How to get file's last modified date on Windows command line?

I have been using the following command to get the file date. However, the fileDate variable has been returning blank value ever since we moved to a different server (Windows Server 2003).

FOR /f %%a in ('dir myfile.txt^|find /i " myfile.txt"') DO SET fileDate=%%a 

Is there any other more reliable way to get the file date?

You could try the 'Last Written' time options associated with the DIR command

/T:C -- Creation Time and Date
/T:A -- Last Access Time and Date
/T:W -- Last Written Time and Date (default)

DIR /T:W myfile.txt

The output from the above command will produce a variety of additional details you probably wont need, so you could incorporate two FINDSTR commands to remove blank lines, plus any references to 'Volume', 'Directory' and 'bytes':

DIR /T:W myfile.txt | FINDSTR /v "^$" | FINDSTR /v /c:"Volume" /c:"Directory" /c:"bytes"

Attempts to incorporate the blank line target (/c:"^$" or "^$") within a single FINDSTR command fail to remove the blank lines (or produce other errors) when the results are output to a text file.

This is a cleaner command:

DIR /T:W myfile.txt | FINDSTR /c:"/"

It works for me on Vista. Some things to try:

1. Replace find with the fully-qualified path of the find command. find is a common tool name. There's a unix find that is very differet from the Windows built-in find. like this:
   FOR /f %%a in ('dir ^|%windir%\system32\find.exe /i "myfile.txt"') DO SET fileDate=%%a

2. examine the output of the command in a cmd.exe window. To do that, You need to replace the %% with %.
   FOR /f %a in ('dir ^|c:\windows\system32\find.exe /i "myfile.txt"') DO SET fileDate=%a
   That may give you some ideas.

3. If that shows up as blank, then again, at a command prompt, try this:

   dir | c:\windows\system32\find.exe /i "myfile.txt"

This should show you what you need to see.

If you still can't figure it out from that, edit your post to include what you see from these commands and someone will help you.

you can get a files modified date using vbscript too

Set objFS=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments
strFile= objArgs(0)
WScript.Echo objFS.GetFile(strFile).DateLastModified

save the above as mygetdate.vbs and on command line

c:\test> cscript //nologo mygetdate.vbs myfile

You can do it

forfiles /M myfile.txt /C "cmd /c echo @fdate @ftime"

If you're able to bring in an EXE, I recommend gdate.exe from GNU CoreUtils for Windows). It can give the current date or the date of a file, in many different formats, and customizable. I use it to get me the last modified date-time of files that I can compare without any parsing (ie. local-independent), using the %s (seconds since the epoch), optionally with %N to get nano-second precision.

Some examples:

C:\>dir MyFile.txt
02/10/2021  10:54 PM                 4 MyFile.txt

C:\>gdate -r MyFile.txt +%Y-%m-%d
2021-02-10

C:\>gdate -r MyFile.txt "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"
2021-02-10 22:54:50

C:\>gdate -r MyFile.txt +%s
1613015690

C:\>gdate -r MyFile.txt +%s.%N
1613015690.093962600

To get the last modification date/time of a file in a locale-independent manner you could use the wmic command with the DataFile alias:

wmic DataFile where "Name='D:\\Path\\To\\myfile.txt'" get LastModified /VALUE

Regard that the full path to the file must be provided and that all path separators (backslashes \) must be doubled herein.

This returns a standardised date/time value like this (meaning 12^th of August 2019, 13:00:00, UTC + 120'):

LastModified=20190812130000.000000+120

To capture the date/time value use for /F, then you can assign it to a variable using set:

for /F "delims=" %%I in ('
    wmic DataFile where "Name='D:\\Path\\To\\myfile.txt'" get LastModified /VALUE
') do for /F "tokens=1* delims==" %%J in ("%%I") do set "DateTime=%%K"

The second for /F loop avoids artefacts (like orphaned carriage-return characters) from conversion of the Unicode output of wmic to ASCII/ANSI text by the first for /F loop (see also this answer).

You can then use sub-string expansion to extract the pure date or the time from this:

set "DateOnly=%DateTime:~0,8%"
set "TimeOnly=%DateTime:~8,6%"

To get the creation date/time or the last access date/time, just replace the property LastModified by CreationDate or LastAccessed, respectively. To get information about a directory rather than a file, use the alias FSDir instead of DataFile.

For specifying file (or directory) paths/names containing both , and ), which are usually not accepted by wmic, take a look at this question.

Check out also this post as well as this one about how to get file and directory date/time stamps.

What output (exactly) does dir myfile.txt give in the current directory? What happens if you set the delimiters?

FOR /f "tokens=1,2* delims= " %%a in ('dir myfile.txt^|find /i " myfile.txt"') DO SET fileDate=%%a 

(note the space after delims=)
(to make life easier, you can do this from the command line by replacing %%a with %a)

Useful reference to get file properties using a batch file, included is the last modified time:

FOR %%? IN ("C:\somefile\path\file.txt") DO (
    ECHO File Name Only       : %%~n?
    ECHO File Extension       : %%~x?
    ECHO Name in 8.3 notation : %%~sn?
    ECHO File Attributes      : %%~a?
    ECHO Located on Drive     : %%~d?
    ECHO File Size            : %%~z?
    ECHO Last-Modified Date   : %%~t?
    ECHO Drive and Path       : %%~dp?
    ECHO Drive                : %%~d?
    ECHO Fully Qualified Path : %%~f?
    ECHO FQP in 8.3 notation  : %%~sf?
    ECHO Location in the PATH : %%~dp$PATH:?
)