Programming

A lot of times in Unix, you would want to find out how many seconds (or minutes, or hours) back a particular file was updated. You would want to do it for several reasons - find out the last time some configuration file was changed, or may to track some update done by a different system, or anything that fancies your mind.

Though the script can be written as a Unix shell script, I found it a bit cumbersome. Moreover, the PERL solution was much more flexible, elegant and readable.

So, here is the PERL script that calculates the time period between the modified date of a file, and the system date.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use File::stat;
# Declare variables
my $filename;
my $FILE_HANDLE;
my $file_stat;
my $current_time;
my $diff_seconds;
$filename = '/path/of/file/filename.ext';
# Open the file
open ($FILE_HANDLE, $filename)
or die "Can't open $filename!";
# Get the file status structure
$file_stat = stat($FILE_HANDLE);
# Get the current time
$current_time = time;
# Get the elapsed time in seconds
$diff_seconds = time - $file_stat->mtime;
# Do whatever you want with the $diff_seconds
print "\n$filename was modified $diff_seconds seconds back.\n";
# All done

Note:

• Instead of the $file_stat->mtime, you can use $file_stat->ctime to get the time from creation of the file.
• To get the elapsed time in minutes, divide $diff_seconds by 60. For hours, divide by 3600. And so on.

Ever since I became officially invovled in Drupal, the importance of version control system seems to grow larger in my point of view. The ease of use in coding over a duration, and working on multiple projects, with multiple people, are all the advantages of using a version control.

CVS is just one of the systems used for version control. There are others like SVN.

My day job invovles development, and that too in a team of other developers with mutliple projects that share code between each other. The present version control system (or seeming lack of it) leaves a lot to be desired. The difference in working on my 'bread earning' projects and Drupal project is like day and night.

I am pushing for the use of CVS (or any version control as a matter of fact) in my workplace. But as in all corporate settings, things move pretty slowly. There are a lot of hoops to jump through.

It took me quite a while to get back on the Drupal contributor track after my hibernation in my other projects. Yesterday, I could chip in some time on it and get the views integration enabled for the Webcomic module. The updated has been done to both the HEAD and the 5.x-1.x-dev branches.

Its performance is a bit spotty and it requires a bit of bug fixing. So, if you are intending on using the Webcomic module on your Drupal installation, go ahead and download the latest development release, and report a bug.