FAQ 5.27 How do I set a file's timestamp in perl?

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5.27: How do I set a file's timestamp in perl?

You use the utime() function documented in "utime" in perlfunc. By way
of example, here's a little program that copies the read and write times
from its first argument to all the rest of them.

if (@ARGV < 2) {
die "usage: cptimes timestamp_file other_files ...\n";
}
my $timestamp = shift;
my($atime, $mtime) = (stat($timestamp))[8,9];
utime $atime, $mtime, @ARGV;

Error checking is, as usual, left as an exercise for the reader.

The perldoc for utime also has an example that has the same effect as
touch(1) on files that *already exist*.

Certain file systems have a limited ability to store the times on a file
at the expected level of precision. For example, the FAT and HPFS
filesystem are unable to create dates on files with a finer granularity
than two seconds. This is a limitation of the filesystems, not of
utime().



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