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

Answer 1

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")}'

Answer 2

You can use:

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

This will display the date in 2 digits.

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

Hope this meets the expectation.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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