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Perl

Get an FTP Listing Entry's Last-Modified Time

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Demonstrates the Chilkat Ftp2.GetLastModifiedTimeStr method, which returns the last-modified time of a cached directory-listing entry as an RFC 822 date-time string. The only argument is a zero-based index.

Background: The last-modified time is the workhorse timestamp: it updates whenever a file's contents change and is what sync and mirror logic compares to decide whether a file needs re-transferring. It is the most reliably reported of the three across FTP servers, and the RFC 822 string carries a timezone so comparisons are well defined.

Chilkat Perl Downloads

Chilkat2 Perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Chilkat2;

# Demonstrates the Ftp2.GetLastModifiedTimeStr method, which returns the last-modified time of a
# cached directory-listing entry as an RFC 822 date-time string.  The only argument is a
# zero-based index.

my $ftp = Chilkat2::Ftp2->new;

$ftp->Hostname('ftp.example.com');
$ftp->Username('myFtpLogin');

# Normally you would not hard-code the password in source.  You should instead obtain it
# from an interactive prompt, environment variable, or a secrets vault.
$ftp->Password('myPassword');

my $success = $ftp->Connect();
if (!$success) {
    print $ftp->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

$success = $ftp->ChangeRemoteDir('public_html');
if (!$success) {
    print $ftp->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

# GetDirCount retrieves the directory listing on the first call and returns the number of
# entries.  A negative return indicates failure.
my $n = $ftp->GetDirCount();
if ($n < 0) {
    print $ftp->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

for my $i (0 .. $n - 1) {
    my $name = $ftp->GetFilename($i);

    # The value is an RFC 822 string such as "Fri, 21 Nov 1997 09:55:06 -0600".
    my $lastModified = $ftp->GetLastModifiedTimeStr($i);
    print $name, '  modified ', $lastModified, "\n";
}

$success = $ftp->Disconnect();
if (!$success) {
    print $ftp->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}