Newbie question

[Hans Nowak]

On 6 Jun 99, mesak1234 at my-deja.com wrote:

> Hi!
> Well, i get problems with getting date from OS....(win32 at this
> moment)... All what i need that to find out date attribute of a file.
> But i even cannot find out what the function i can use to get the real
> time (anything like Date date = new java.util.Date(); ???? :( )
> All functions of 'time library' seem fine but don't help so much...
> Any suggestions?
> Thanks,
>   Daniel

To get the date and time attributes of a file, you can use os.stat. 
E.g. 

os.stat("myfile.txt")

will return a tuple with file info... its size, attributes, etc. 
Element -2 (!) is the time used by the file system. You will see a 
weird long number like, for example, 928696080; this is because date 
and time are packed into one number. Unpack it with the 
time.localtime function. This returns another tuple whose elements 
are pretty straightforward (year, month, etc).

The system time, on the other hand, can be retrieved with 
time.time(). Once again, you'll get one number, which needs to be 
unpacked with time.localtime().

For further information, I suggest you study the time module and 
os.stat. :)

Veel liefs,

--Hans Nowak (ivnowa at hvision.nl)
Homepage: http://fly.to/zephyrfalcon