Getting a file's timestamp using ColdFusion

Many thanks - This saves doing a CFDirectory with a filter applied then faffing about with LSDateformat

You saved my life! I spent the last 4 hours trying to debug what went wrong only to land here and know 'file' is a reserved word. Thank you!

I noticed that when I display the time stamp, its not correct. For example, my file was last modified on 09/18/2008, but the fileDate when displayed, shows:
{ts '1969-12-31 19:00:00'}

Is it just me?

Not sure what may be happening there. You might like to post a message to CF-Talk ( http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk ) and see if anyone has some thoughts.

Thanks. This simple feature was surprisingly hard to find. Even the few people who posted about the java.io.File class usually forgot to include mention java.util.Date, which is essential since CF generally doesn't know anything about Unix timestamps.

I have run into the same 1969 problem as well. Clearly it's not calculating the date properly using this method, but I cannot find an alternative, nothing on HoF so far either. Those that got it to work right, did you do anything in addition to the posted code?

Ok I got it. The problem in the code for me was the usage of expandPath. This worked for me when I tweaked it:

<cfset filePath = "#GetCurrentTemplatePath()#">
<cfset fileObj = createObject("java","java.io.File").init(filePath)>
<cfset fileDate = createObject("java","java.util.Date").init(fileObj.lastModified())>

Rob, thanks for the update.

This is great for reading a file's Last Modified date. Unfortunately, this value doesn't change when you copy a file. I have a situation (on a Windows 2003 server with CFMX 6.1) whereby I copy files to a temporary folder for users to retrieve. I want to read the Created date, or else possibly update the Modified date after a file is copied so that an automated task can look in the folder and delete files older than X minutes. The last modified date carries over from the original that is copied, so you don't have a true picture of how long the file has been in the temp directory. Is there a way to access the Created Date attribute of a file using java.util.Date (preferable)? Or a way to make a change to the last modified attribute after a file has been copied (less preferable)?

You might be able to find a utility that lets you change the timestamp on a file. There may also be a couple of other options, depending on your setup.

One option might be to write a record to a database table with the current date/time and filename and use this to control which files should be deleted.

Another option may be to copy each file into a subdirectory based on a UUID and use the timestamp on the directory instead.