From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-03-07T01:19:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Attributing an old time stamp for a new file.

On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 12:34:51AM +0900, Peter Bailey wrote:
> unknown wrote:
> > On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Peter Bailey wrote:
> > 
> >> Hello,
> >> I need to read some data from some older files and put that info. into
> >> simple ASCII text files. But, I want those new text files to have the
> >> same time stamp as the original files that the data came from. Is there
> >> any way to do that?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Peter
> > 
> > harp: ~> ri FileUtils.touch
> > -------------------------------------------------------- FileUtils#touch
> >       touch(list, options = {})
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >       Options: noop verbose
> > 
> >       Updates modification time (mtime) and access time (atime) of
> >       file(s) in +list+. Files are created if they don't exist.
> > 
> >         FileUtils.touch 'timestamp'
> >         FileUtils.touch Dir.glob('*.c');  system 'make'
> > 
> > 
> > -a
> 
> Thanks. ri verbage is rarely clear to me. These sample lines definitely 
> seem to be referring to Unix stuff.

Not really. The first creates an empty file called 'timestamp'; the second
updates the timestamps of all files *.c in the current directory, and then
runs 'make' (which could be a DOS command)

> "make" means nothing in Windows. 
> where I am. Thanks, anyway.

Use the source :-)

Find fileutils.rb on your system (on mine it's
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb but it'll be different under Windows)

Scan down to "def touch". You'll see it's a simple function which just calls

    File.utime(t, t, path)

which I think is what you're really looking for.

------------------------------------------------------------ File::utime
     File.utime(atime, mtime, file_name,...)   =>  integer
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Sets the access and modification times of each named file to the
     first two arguments. Returns the number of file names in the
     argument list.