It looks like this has to do with mixing the usage of the
"native" stat of Perl with the "object" version from File::stat.
The 'stat' from File::stat returns a reference to an object,
which has the stuff you're wanting, tucked away internally as
object variables. You need to do:
use File::stat;
$statRef = stat('testfile');
$mtime = $statRef->mtime ()
Hoping this helps.
Bob
On 10/19/18 7:47 PM, Martin McCormick
wrote:
I am a member of a perl discussion list but it seems to have gone
away so I hope somebody here can give me an idea as to why the
stat function is not working.
Create a file called testfile in your working directory
and then run the following perl script:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings::unused;
use File::stat;
use File::Spec;
my $last_update_time;
$last_update_time = ( stat("testfile") )[9];
printf("%d\n",$last_update_time);
As this stands, it should print a 10 or so digit number
representing the number of seconds since Midnight UTC on January
1 of 1970. What it actually does is to not set the variable and
you get the "Use of uninitialized variable" squawk with no
value assignment to the variable.
The [9] referrs to the ninth element in an array which
should be the time stamp.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ