finding time differences between 2 files

[Mike Blansfield]

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

[Martin Robinson]

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.

[Martin Robinson]

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";

[A. Clay Stephenson]

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