Print a file's last modified date in Bash

Question

Isn't the 'date' command much simpler? No need for awk, stat, etc.

date -r <filename>

Also, consider looking at the man page for date formatting; for example with common date and time format:

date -r <filename> "+%m-%d-%Y %H:%M:%S"

You can use the stat command

stat -c %y "$entry"

More info

%y   time of last modification, human-readable

Alternatively, you may try also :

date -r filename +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

On OS X, I like my date to be in the format of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM in the output for the file.

So to specify a file I would use:

stat -f "%Sm" -t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" [filename]

If I want to run it on a range of files, I can do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
for i in /var/log/*.out; do
  stat -f "%Sm" -t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" "$i"
done

This example will print out the last time I ran the sudo periodic daily weekly monthly command as it references the log files.

---

To add the filenames under each date, I would run the following instead:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
for i in /var/log/*.out; do
  stat -f "%Sm" -t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" "$i"
  echo "$i"
done

The output would was the following:

2016-40-01 16:40
/var/log/daily.out
2016-40-01 16:40
/var/log/monthly.out
2016-40-01 16:40
/var/log/weekly.out

Unfortunately I'm not sure how to prevent the line break and keep the file name appended to the end of the date without adding more lines to the script.

---

PS - I use #!/usr/bin/env bash as I'm a Python user by day, and have different versions of bash installed on my system instead of #!/bin/bash

Adding to @StevePenny answer, you might want to cut the not-so-human-readable part:

stat -c%y Localizable.strings | cut -d'.' -f1

I wanted to get a file's modification date in YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format. Here is how I did it:

date -d @$( stat -c %Y myfile.css ) +%Y%m%d%H%M%S

Explanation. It's the combination of these commands:

stat -c %Y myfile.css # Get the modification date as a timestamp
date -d @1503989421 +%Y%m%d%H%M%S # Convert the date (from timestamp)

EDITED: turns out that I had forgotten the quotes needed for $entry in order to print correctly and not give the "no such file or directory" error. Thank you all so much for helping me!

Here is my final code:

    echo "Please type in the directory you want all the files to be listed with last modified dates" #bash can't find file creation dates

read directory

for entry in "$directory"/*

do
modDate=$(stat -c %y "$entry") #%y = last modified. Qoutes are needed otherwise spaces in file name with give error of "no such file"
modDate=${modDate%% *} #%% takes off everything off the string after the date to make it look pretty
echo $entry:$modDate

Prints out like this:

/home/joanne/Dropbox/cheat sheet.docx:2012-03-14
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp:2013-05-05
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 150 java.zip:2013-02-11
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 151 Java 2.zip:2013-02-11
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 162 Assembly Language.zip:2013-02-11
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 262 Comp Architecture.zip:2012-12-12
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 345 Image Processing.zip:2013-02-11
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 362 Operating Systems:2013-05-05
/home/joanne/Dropbox/Comp 447 Societal Issues.zip:2013-02-11