Sometimes ls just doesn't cut the mustard

Occasionally I want more than ls can give me.

On this occasion I required the file modification date in a specific format for a specified file. So here's a perl one-liner to give it to me.

perl -e '$mtime=(stat(@ARGV))[9];@f=(localtime($mtime))[3..5];printf "%02d/%02d/%d\n",$f[0],$f[1]+1,$f[2]+1900;' filename

This produces the date in dd/mm/yyyy format.

Just what I wanted.

Here's another similar script to get the file size

perl -e '$size=(stat(@ARGV))[7];printf "%d\n",$size;' filename

This is the information you can get from stat

0  dev     device number of filesystem
1  ino     inode number
2  mode    file mode (type and permissions)
3  nlink   number of (hard) links to the file
4  uid     numeric user ID of file's owner
5  gid     numeric group ID of file's owner
6  rdev    the device identifier (special files only)
7  size    total size of file, in bytes
8  atime   last access time in seconds since the epoch
9  mtime   last modify time in seconds since the epoch
10 ctime   inode change time in seconds since the epoch
11 blksize preferred block size for file system I/O
12 blocks  actual number of blocks allocated