I have been told by a professor that you can get a file's last modification time by using utime.h. However, the man page seem to cite that utime() only sets this value. How can I look up the last time a file was changed in C on a UNIX system?
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This returns the file's mtime, the "time of last data modification". Note that Unix also has a concept ctime, the "time of last status change" (see also ctime, atime, mtime).
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
time_t get_mtime(const char *path)
{
struct stat statbuf;
if (stat(path, &statbuf) == -1) {
perror(path);
exit(1);
}
return statbuf.st_mtime;
}
Fred Foo
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@AldySyahdeini `localtime(3)` – Fred Foo Apr 18 '14 at 23:08
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1This was answered in 2010 but it's 2016 now and nanosecond resolution has been implemented since Linux kernel 2.5.48, POSIX.1-2008 and glibc 2.12. So using `statbuf.st_mtim` to get a `struct timespec` instead of using `statbuf.st_mtime` should work everwhere these days. – josch Jun 23 '16 at 11:48
