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

Abadan

read -p "Please type in the directory you want all the files to be listed" directory – Redeemable

Answer 1

You can use the stat command

stat -c %y "$entry"

More info

%y   time of last modification, human-readable

Troglodyte

for entry in "$directory"/* do stat -c%y "$entry" done Doesn't work. Prints out stat: missing operand in terminal – Abadan

Hm, could it be my unbuntu? Do you know what the requirements of using stat is? – Abadan

Note that on OS X (Mac), it's stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" filename (see man stat examples for more details) – Spanjian

Note that on BSD the stat command has a different syntax. My case for FreeBSD: stat -f %Sm -t %F" "%R filename. – Whichsoever

Answer 2

Isn't the 'date' command much simpler? No need for awk, stat, etc.

date -r <filename>

Also, consider looking at the man page for date formatting; for example with common date and time format:

date -r <filename> "+%m-%d-%Y %H:%M:%S"

Peppard

Much simpler then using stat / more available. – Pinkster

It looks like BSD (or at least OS X's) date's doesn't have this. Its -r is just used to provide a timestamp to format. You'll have to use GNU date to get this functionality. – Ous

On OSX use: date stat -f "%Sm" -t "%m%d%H%M%y" "${1}" – Planish

@Mich - I get stat no such file or directory – Hare

On OS X 10.10 date -r <filename> works as advertised, although the man page doesn't describe any <filename> argument. – Bog

is there a way to get more granular time than seconds? – Brainless

yes @AlexanderMills you can just specify your format date -r <filename> "+%b %d %Y %T %Z" – Prehension

No date -r on OS X 10.11, but gdate -r from GNU Core Utils works. – Shortridge

In macOS 10.13 date [-r seconds | filename] is fully documented in the man page, and works as expected. – Holy

I love this answer, particularly because date -r $FILE +%s.%N can provide more precision than stat -c%Y – Fossorial

Piped: echo "${file}" | xargs date +%s -r – Sandalwood

How'd this change for directory? – Yell

Answer 3

Alternatively, you may try also :

date -r filename +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

Unsnarl

This answer is a duplicate of https://mcmap.net/q/125372/-print-a-file-39-s-last-modified-date-in-bash – Nightjar

@UlysseBN no it's slightly different. He's advocating for a better date format. – Khartoum

Answer 4

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

D

In case you haven't figured out the line break part, the -e flag is available for the echo program. Example usage could be: echo -e "$(stat -f %Sm -t %Y%m%d_%H%M%S $AFile)\t$AFile.". In your case it could be: echo -e "$(stat -f "%Sm" -t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" "$i")\t$i." ` – Colettacolette

Answer 5

Adding to @StevePenny answer, you might want to cut the not-so-human-readable part:

stat -c%y Localizable.strings | cut -d'.' -f1

Bit

Answer 6

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

Conure

Answer 7

If file name has no spaces:

ls -l <dir> | 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 <dir> | awk '{printf ("%s %s %s ",  $6,  $7, $8); for (i=9;   i<=NF; i++){ printf ("%s ", $i)}; printf ("\n")}'

Orientalism

Ah, I see! That mostly works, except for the files with the spaces in the names. Is there a solution for that? – Abadan

Actually, I tried it again, and it doesn't work... turns out I was trying out a directory that had file names without spaces. =/ Edited my answer below – Abadan

when you say it does not work, can you say what is the error? it works for me when i executed it on my system. – Orientalism

I got a "no such file or directory". – Abadan

That is because you passed a value of <dir> which does not exist....the code is perfectly fine. – Orientalism

Answer 8

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

Abadan

Answer 9

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)

Demagogue

Answer 10

To get the modification date of a file in the format YYYYMMDD_hhmm:

date -r <file> "+%Y%m%d_%H%M"

    20240119_1018

MODDATE=`date -r <file> "+%Y%m%d_%H%M"`

echo $MODDATE

    20240119_1018

This can also be done in a brute force way with

stat -c %y <file>

    2024-01-19 10:18:17.000000000 -0500

stat -c %y <file> | sed "s/^\(....\)-\(..\)-\(..\) \(..\):\(..\).*$/\1\2\3_\4\5/"

    20240119_1018

MODATE=`stat -c %y <file> | sed "s/^\(....\)-\(..\)-\(..\) \(..\):\(..\).*$/\1\2\3_\4\5/"`

echo $MODATE

    20240119_1018

Canonicals

Answer 11

You can use:

ls -lrt filename |awk '{printf "%02d",$7}'

This will display the date (a current day of a month) in 2 digits.

If between 1 to 9 it adds "0" prefix to it and converts to 01 - 09.

Hope this meets the expectation.

Dehnel

It's an anti-pattern to parse ls output. – Rhiamon