I'm new to Linux. I'm using the command-line. I'm trying to view the last modified date of a file. How do I do that in Linux from the Command Line?
7 Answers
As mentioned by @edvinas.me, stat
tells you various information about the file including the last modified date.
At first, I was confused with Modify and Change, just to clarify, stat
output lists:
- Access shows the time of last data access (e.g. read).
- Modify shows the time of last data modification.
- Change shows the time the file status last changed.
For example:
~ $ touch foo
~ $ stat foo
File: ‘foo’
Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 regular empty file
Device: fc01h/64513d Inode: 410397 Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: (80972/ etomort) Gid: (18429/ eem_tw)
Access: 2015-09-21 12:06:11.343616258 +0200
Modify: 2015-09-21 12:06:11.343616258 +0200
Change: 2015-09-21 12:06:11.343616258 +0200
Birth: -
~ $ echo "Added bar to foo file" >> foo
~ $ stat foo
File: ‘foo’
Size: 42 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: fc01h/64513d Inode: 410654 Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: (80972/ etomort) Gid: (18429/ eem_tw)
Access: 2015-09-21 12:09:31.298712951 +0200
Modify: 2015-09-21 12:09:31.298712951 +0200
Change: 2015-09-21 12:09:31.302713093 +0200
Birth: -
~ $ chmod 444 foo
~ $ stat foo
File: ‘foo’
Size: 42 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: fc01h/64513d Inode: 410654 Links: 1
Access: (0444/-r--r--r--) Uid: (80972/ etomort) Gid: (18429/ eem_tw)
Access: 2015-09-21 12:09:31.298712951 +0200
Modify: 2015-09-21 12:09:31.298712951 +0200
Change: 2015-09-21 12:10:16.040310543 +0200
Birth: -
Use stat
command for that:
$ stat file
-
41If you want just the last modified date (in human-readable form), use
stat -c '%y' file
Feb 19, 2015 at 14:53 -
1In addition to @AdamTaylor,
date '+%F %T' -d "@$( stat -c '%Y' "$filepath"; )"
.– ArtfaithJun 4, 2022 at 6:09
Another way that is more flexible is using date -r
. From man date
:
-r, --reference=FILE
display the last modification time of FILE
This has the advantage of allowing you to specify the output format, e.g.
$ date -r foo
Thu Aug 31 10:36:28 AEST 2017
$ date -r foo -R
Thu, 31 Aug 2017 10:36:28 +1000
$ date -r foo -u
Thu Aug 31 00:36:28 UTC 2017
$ date -r foo +%s
1504139788
-
3Yes, very helpful, thanks. Here is a bash function that will rename a file to be prefixed by the modified time: function mvfilestime() { if [ x"${1}" = "x" ] ; then echo "mvfilestime: Missing argument of file to mv" else f=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M" -r ${1})-${1} echo mv ${1} ${f} mv ${1} ${f} fi }– TravelerApr 17, 2018 at 19:39
-
1iso-8601:
date -r foo -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"
(works on Linux and OSX)– GerryJul 3, 2021 at 13:51
ls -l
should do the work.
Example:
#> ls -l /home/TEST/
total 16
-rw-r--r-- 1 rfmas1 nms 949 Nov 16 12:21 create_nd_lists.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 rfmas1 nms 0 Nov 16 12:35 enb_list
-rw-r--r-- 1 rfmas1 nms 0 Nov 16 12:35 nb_list
-rw-r--r-- 1 rfmas1 nms 0 Nov 16 12:35 nodes_ip.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 rfmas1 nms 0 Nov 16 12:35 rnc_list
Building off of @Adam Taylor 's comment in @phoops 's answer and @Sparhawk 's answer.
To specifically just get the date (using October 3, 2019 for examples because it was my last birthday)
stat -c %y file | cut -d' ' -f1
will give you2019-10-03
date +%F -r file
will also give you2019-10-03
date +%D -r file
will give you10/03/19
date +%x -r file
will probably give either10/03/2019
, or10/03/19
if you're in the U.S. and either03/10/2019
, or03/10/19
if you're in the U.K., just to name a couple examples (of course there are more possibilities)
These date
format options are, to my understanding, combinations of other format options. Here are some explanations from the man page:
%b locale's abbreviated month name (e.g., Jan)
%B locale's full month name (e.g., January)
...
%d day of month (e.g, 01)
%D date; same as %m/%d/%y
%e day of month, space padded; same as %_d
%F full date; same as %Y-%m-%d
...
%m month (01..12)
...
%x locale's date representation (e.g., 12/31/99)
...
%y last two digits of year (00..99)
%Y year
...
By default, date pads numeric fields with zeroes.
The following optional flags may follow `%':
- (hyphen) do not pad the field
_ (underscore) pad with spaces
0 (zero) pad with zeros
^ use upper case if possible
use opposite case if possible
N.B.: These flags don't work on the "combo formats" like %F
, %D
and %x
. They are for the "singular field formats".
Apparently this last flag (#) does not work as I'd expect (e.g., if date +%b
gives Oct
, date +%#b
gives OCT
as opposed to oCT
) I guess this would be useless, but I'd think a lower case option would be more useful. date +%#p
does turn date +%p
which might give PM
or AM
into pm
or am
, respectively. So I guess it's not a 'per-character' case switch but sets the case of all the characters in the string to the opposite case of the majority of the characters? Also date +%P
gives pm
or am
, but neither date +%^P
nor date +%#P
change its output. My guess for this case is that %P
is just an alias for %#p
, and it seems that whenever you add more than one flag, the behavior is undefined/unpredictable ( e.g., date +%0-e
gives the same as date +%-e
: 3
and date +%-0e
gives the same as date +%0e
: 03
, which makes you think that only the flag next to the letter works or that it goes left to right, but both date +%#^p
and date +%^#p
give pm
or am
, [depending on the time of course] ) unless there's some hidden order of operations? Sorry for digressing...
Also, if you run the command locale -k LC_TIME | grep ^d_fmt
, you can see the combo for the specific locale of your system (e.g., d_fmt="%m/%d/%Y"
).
And you can make your own combo. For example,
date +%^b\ %-e\ %Y -r file
will give youOCT 3 2019
1) List Files directory with Last Modified Date/Time
To list files and shows the last modified files at top, we will use
-lt
options withls
command.$ ls -lt /run output total 24 -rw-rw-r--. 1 root utmp 2304 Sep 8 14:58 utmp -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4 Sep 8 12:41 dhclient-eth0.pid drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root 100 Sep 8 03:31 lock drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 60 Sep 7 23:11 user drwxr-xr-x. 7 root root 160 Aug 26 14:59 udev drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 60 Aug 21 13:18 tuned
https://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/how-sort-files-date-using-ls-command-linux/
If the file is on another webserver, I like httpie
(docs).
Installation
pip install httpie --user
Usage
The -h
command gives only the header. The pattern is
http -h [url] | grep 'Last-Modified\|Date'
Example:
$ http -h https://martin-thoma.com/author/martin-thoma/ | grep 'Last-Modified\|Date'
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2017 10:06:43 GMT
Last-Modified: Fri, 06 Jan 2017 07:42:34 GMT
The Date
is important as this reports the server time, not your local time. Also, not every server sends Last-Modified
(e.g. superuser seems not to do it).
ls -l
also works...ls -l
the modified date or the create date?man ls
. Typical Linux file systems don't even track creation date -- see the accepted answer for the kinds of dates kept track of.