Stat command to capture last modified date of file in Solaris

Question

How to use stat command in solaris to get last modified time of file in a variable.

Consider my file is "abc.txt" in path /home/xyz/Desktop

Answer 1

Maybe you have Perl:

perl -e 'print scalar((stat $ARGV[0])[9])' /home/xyz/Desktop/abc.txt
1394183519

The answer is in seconds since the Epoch.

Or into a variable:

var=$(perl 'print scalar((stat $ARGV[0])[9])' /home/xyz/Desktop/abc.txt)

If you want human-readable:

perl -MPOSIX -e 'print POSIX::strftime "%d/%m/%Y\n", localtime((stat $ARGV[0])[9])' yourfile
07/03/2014

Answer 2

ls -l will show the last modified time. If you have a recent Solaris release, you can use the stat command to get a more detailed view:

# ls -l abc.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root          29 Mar  7 09:45 abc.txt
# stat abc.txt
  File: `abc.txt'
  Size: 29              Blocks: 2          IO Block: 8192   regular file
Device: 3240001h/52690945d      Inode: 64859       Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2014-03-07 09:44:37.006708000 +0000
Modify: 2014-03-07 09:45:50.226502000 +0000
Change: 2014-03-07 09:46:25.869958000 +0000
# cat /etc/release
                             Oracle Solaris 11.1 X86
  Copyright (c) 1983, 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates.  All rights reserved.
                           Assembled 19 September 2012

If your Solaris release doesn't have the stat command available, you can use that hack:

# truss -f -v 'lstat,lstat64' ls -d abc.txt 2>&1 | grep "mt ="
612:            mt = Mar  7 09:46:57 CET 2014  [ 1394182017.056711000 ]