How to list atime for files?

Question

According to this post can stat be used to give the atime on Linux, but FreeBSD 10.1 doesn't have the GNU stat.

How do I list the atime for files?

Solution 1

ls -lu

where -l will provide a long listing format and -u will sort by access time.

Solution 2

I've always used:

ls -l -u

Alternatively - maybe break out perl?

Perl can use the stat syscall directly

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
foreach my $filename ( @ARGV ) {
    print "$filename =>", (stat($filename))[8],"\n";
}

You can one-liner this as:

perl -e 'print "$_ ",(stat($_))[8],"\n" for @ARGV' <filename(s)>

If you want to do a prettier timestamp (rather than epoch which is what stat returns):

perl -MTime::Piece -e 'print "$_ ",Time::Piece->new((stat($_))[8]),"\n" for @ARGV'

or

perl -MTime::Piece -e 'print "$_ ",Time::Piece->new((stat($_))[8])->strftime("%F %T"),"\n" for @ARGV'

Which uses strftime and %F %T to give you:

2015-09-06 01:02:33

Expanding the script:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::Piece; 
foreach my $filename ( @ARGV ) {
    my $epoch_time = (stat($filename))[8];
    my $time_string = Time::Piece -> new ( $epoch_time ) -> strftime ( "%F %T" );
    print "$time_string => $filename\n";
}

Solution 3

With FreeBSD stat:

stat -f '%Sa' file

%Sa mean you want file access time as String.

Comments

[jordanm]

According to this manpage, FreeBSD's stat should contain the same functionality.

[Rashini Gamalath]

@jordanm GNU coreutils stat also gives you access, modify, and change times, and it's by default, no extra arguments to make it happen (checked with coreutils version 8.26)

[jordanm]

FreeBSD's ls doesn't have --time.

[Sobrique]

OK. Updated with an alternative :)