Using Perl On Linux To Do Mass Synchronization Of File Time Stamps

Hey There,

Today we're going to take a look at another quick and simple Perl command line execution statement that you can use to save yourself lots of time ( If it really does equal money, this post is going to be a lot more valuable than I originally thought ;)

In a previous post, we looked at using Perl to figure out how old all our files really are. This post is a little twist on that; and it's a lot less complicated. It will run on whatever version of Perl you have (unless it's ancient ;) and produced equal results on all tested Linux and Unix flavours I could get my hands on.

Today we're going to be using Perl's stat and utime functions (similar to the way we did in our previous Perl post), but instead of using them do determine the ages of all of our files, we're going to use them make all of our files conform to the specific time and date of one representative file. This trick can come in really handy if you wanted to make a system backup consisting only of files that, let's say, are a certain number of days old, and only some of the files that you know you need to backup are slightly older or newer.

The trick is very simple. All you need to do is find one specific file that has a time stamp you want to mimic, and then apply its time stamp attributes to the group of files that you want to modify the time stamp on. So (for a simple example) if you had a directory consisting of 5 files, like this:

host # ls
file1 file2 file3 file4 file5

and you needed them all to share the same time stamp as the file "file1," I'd first suggest that you take some form of online-backup, using tar or cpio (assuming that you may need to reverse the process later):

host # tar cpf /tmp/backout.tar file1 file2 file3 file4 file5

or

host # tar cpf /tmp/backout.tar f* <--- I rarely glob this globally, but, for our example, all the files we want to back up start with "f" and there aren't any others. Worst case, on a tar backup, you can just write over it if you accidentally tar-copy something you didn't want to.

Now, let's take one more look at those files. We'll use "ls -l" to show the time stamp at this time:

host # ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople  90 May 13 22:27 file1
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople   0 May 25 14:25 file2
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople   0 May 25 14:25 file3
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople   0 May 25 14:25 file4
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople   0 May 25 14:25 file5

Now, well make them all have the same time stamp.

We need files 2 through 5 to match the time stamp of file1, as this is how the system is going to determine what to back up later in the day (fill in your own hypothetical situation here ;)

And here's all we have to do to make all the files have the same time stamp as file1 :)

host # perl -e '$x=utime ((stat($ARGV[0]))[8,9], @ARGV);print $x' file1 file[2345]

And we should be all set!

host # ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople  90 May 13 22:27 file1
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople   0 May 13 22:27 file2
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople   0 May 13 22:27 file3
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople   0 May 13 22:27 file4
-rw-r--r--  1 eggi  newpeople   0 May 13 22:27 file5

Now all the files have the same time stamp! You'll note, in the command above, that we only modifed the atime and mtime of the files. This is sufficient because Perl's utime function automatically changes the ctime (or inode change time) to the current date and time. You can include the utime in this Perl command line execution statement (no error will be generated), but it's not necessary.

If you ever do need to copy the ctime, just add the 10th index of the array returned by stat to your command line, like this:

host # perl -e '$x=utime ((stat($ARGV[0]))[8,9,10], @ARGV);print $x' file1 file[2345]

And, of course, you can use this same process on directories as well, without a direct correlation (e.g. copying file timestamps to directories, vice versa and any combination between file types that support time stamps will work :)

Here's hoping this helps you out (at least, a little ;) This simple command can be a very convenient way for you to make massive changes by applying the time stamp of any one file to as many other files as you like. And, no matter how many files you need to do this for, as long as you can wait a few moments for ingenuity to strike, the command line shouldn't get too much longer :)

Cheers,

, Mike