Can I change the update/modify time of a file??

[Kenneth Leung_2]

Is there any way to modify the update/modify time of a file on HPUX?? Pls help. Thanks a lot.

[RAC_1]

You can. Read the man page of touch command.
man touch.

Why you want to do it?

[Senthil Kumar .A_1]

Hi Kenneth,

You can you "touch" command,using which you can modify the "modified time" or "access time" of a file.

For more details refer to man page of "touch" command.

man touch


Regards,
Senthil Kumar .A

[Kenneth Leung_2]

thanks a lot for the help

In fact, I accidentally deleted an critical file. I recovered it from my archive & want to change the modified date to hide my fault....

[RAC_1]

Hiding the fault may not help. It may happen that program/app is looking for certain file ad may complain if it does'nt find it.

[Senthil Kumar .A_1]

Hey Kenneth,

You remind me of my little brother who tries to hide his fault. Anyway cute..

I wish you succeed in hiding yours :)

Regards,
Senthil Kumar .A

[rariasn]

Hi,

?date
Tue May 2 13:03:40 METDST 2006

?touch -t 05020200 prueba

?ll prueba
-rw-r----- 1 usr grp0 May 2 02:00 prueba

? man touch

ran

[Geoff Wild]

Off topic but, you shouldn't hide your fault - things happen - we all make mistakes. Best to learn from them and put processes in place to help prevent mistakes from happening again.

For rm, maybe alias it in /etc/profile:

alias rm='rm -i'

Rgds...Geoff

[Asif Sharif]

The touch command changes certain dates for each file argument. By default, touch sets both the date of last file modification and the date of last file access to the current time.

-t time specifies a particular time using this format:

[[[[cc]yy]MM]dd]hhmm[.ss]

where cc is the optional first 2 digits of the year, yy is the optional last 2 digits of the year, MM is the optional number of the month (01-12), dd is the optional day of the month, hh is the hour in 24 hour format (required), mm is the minutes (required), ss is the optional seconds.

EXAMPLES
touch newfile

sets the modification time of newfile to the present.

touch -t 8001031305 oldfile

sets the modification time of oldfile to 13:05 on January 3, 1980.

touch -r oldfile newfile

sets the modification time of newfile to that of oldfile.

Regards,
Asif Sharif

[Kannan Varadachari]

But it changes the create time to the current time, which I do not want. I would like to update the modify time to create time, keeping the create time the same.

dbracsora1:/tmp # ls -l tmpFileKernelParms.txt
-rw-r----- 1 oracle dba 11 Dec 31 1969 tmpFileKernelParms.txt
dbracsora1:/tmp # ls -lc tmpFileKernelParms.txt
-rw-r----- 1 oracle dba 11 Jun 3 07:09 tmpFileKernelParms.txt
dbracsora1:/tmp # touch -t 200606030710 tmpFileKernelParms.txt
dbracsora1:/tmp # ls -l tmpFileKernelParms.txt
-rw-r----- 1 oracle dba 11 Jun 3 07:10 tmpFileKernelParms.txt
dbracsora1:/tmp # ls -lc tmpFileKernelParms.txt
-rw-r----- 1 oracle dba 11 Jun 8 13:00 tmpFileKernelParms.txt
dbracsora1:/tmp #