topic Re: finding time differences between 2 files in Operating System - HP-UX

finding time differences between 2 files

Mike Blansfield — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:32:02 GMT

Good day,
I need a script that will tell me the time difference between 2 files. I know that has to been been done before but I am having trouble finding it on the net. Acually I found one but it bombs. Any help much appreciated and reciprocated!

Thanks,

Mike Blansfield

Re: finding time differences between 2 files

Martin Robinson — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:37:08 GMT

Shells (csh & sh) have poor time support. I would use the system call 'stat' to get the time info. You can either write a C program or access stat from perl. This will allow you to calculate the time difference in seconds, if that is what you are after.

Re: finding time differences between 2 files

Martin Robinson — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:56:47 GMT

Although my perl is not good, this works:

$file1=@ARGV[0];
$file2=@ARGV[1];
@stat1 = stat($file1);
@stat2 = stat($file2);
$time1 = @stat1[9];
$time2 = @stat2[9];
print "File $file1 $time1\n";
print "File $file2 $time2\n";
$diff = $time2 - $time1;
print "Difference is $diff seconds\n";

Re: finding time differences between 2 files

A. Clay Stephenson — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 12:54:38 GMT

Here's a Perl script that can optionally determine if a file is older than an arbitrary number of seconds OR (with the -e arg will output the datestamp (in seconds since 1-Jan-1970 0000 UTC). It will by default use modification time but can optionally output last access time or last change (chmod) time.

Invoke as fileage.pl for full usage.

Here is an example of your task:
#!/usr/bin/sh
PROG=${0}
if [[ ${#} -ne 2 ]]
then
echo "Usage: ${PROG} file1 file2" >&2
exit 255
fi
F1=${1}
F2=${2}
shift 2
AGE=$(( $(fileage.pl -e ${F1}) - $(fileage.pl -e ${F2}) ))
echo "${AGE}"
exit 0