How to get file s last modified date on Windows command line

Question

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

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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   gt dir MyFile txt 02 10 2021  10 54 PM                 4 MyFile txt  C   gt gdate -r MyFile txt   Y- m- d 2021-02-10  C   gt gdate -r MyFile txt  quot   Y- m- d  H  M  S quot  2021-02-10 22 54 50  C   gt gdate -r MyFile txt   s 1613015690  C   gt gdate -r MyFile txt   s  N 1613015690 093962600

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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 12th 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

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Change   to    for use in batch file  for   ta syntax enter call      for  a in  MyFile txt  do set FileDate   ta   Sample output   for  a in  MyFile txt  do set FileDate   ta set FileDate 05 05 2020 09 47 AM  for  a in  file not exist file txt  do set FileDate   ta set FileDate

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You can do it  forfiles  M myfile txt  C  cmd  c echo  fdate  ftime

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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 gt  cscript   nologo mygetdate vbs myfile

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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

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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

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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  quot    quot    FINDSTR  v  c  quot Volume quot   c  quot Directory quot   c  quot bytes quot   Attempts to incorporate the blank line target   c  quot    quot  or  quot    quot   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  quot   quot

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It works for me on Vista   Some things to try    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 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   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

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

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