Finding the Last Modified Date on a File

January 11, 2007

This question came up on my local CFUG mailing list yesterday:

how can I get the time last updated of the two documents? I know you can do this with uploaded files using FILE.TimeLastModified. Is there anyway to do it with existing files? I know I could do a hack with CFDIRECTORY where I loop through the files in the directory looking for the one I'm interested in and then getting the dateLastModified on that, but I'm thinking there has to be a more direct way.

You can use java's File class to get the lastModified timestamp:

<cfset myFile = CreateObject("java", "java.io.File")>
<cfset myFile.init("/path/to/file")>
<cfset last_modified = myFile.lastModified()>

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Comments

On 01/11/2007 at 4:33:30 PM EST Sam Farmer wrote:

Thats a great solution.

There is also the filter attribute to cfdirectory that would negate the need to loop over and look for the file. Still I think the Java File solution is better.

On 01/11/2007 at 5:45:50 PM EST Elliott wrote:

If you don't want to be dependent on Java you can use <cfdirectory>, specify a filter that is the file name and a query of queries on the result to match the actual file (fix due to wildcards in file name).

No need to loop. :)

Its slower, but more portable.

On 01/11/2007 at 5:59:22 PM EST Sam wrote:

Well, you don't exactly have to loop through it. Can't you just query it?

On 06/15/2007 at 10:53:24 AM EDT Navin wrote:

I want to display last modified date in HTML page.

On 07/26/2007 at 1:00:14 PM EDT Patrick Whittingham wrote:

Do I use the absolute path (ie., d:/..a.js) and I'm getting a number (ie., 1178038419822 ). Why?

On 02/20/2008 at 9:48:06 PM EST bruce wrote:

you may try this: File file = new File(filename); long time = file.System.currentTimeMillis(); boolean success = file.setLastModified(newModifiedTime); if (!success) {...} // operation failed.

On 04/17/2008 at 4:44:20 PM EDT Kevin penny wrote:

Documentation says: Returns the time that the file denoted by this abstract pathname was last modified.

Returns: A long value representing the time the file was last modified, measured in milliseconds since the epoch (00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970), or 0L if the file does not exist or if an I/O error occurs

I suppose you'd have to compare it at the ms level in that case -

On 04/17/2008 at 5:32:12 PM EDT Kevin Penny wrote:

Actually, this works better as it takes into account your local timezone difference between your server and GMT.

This will convert the Base Jan 1970 time into MS where you can then use simple math to do your comparisons at the MilliSeconds level.