Read file attributes (on UNIX filesystem)?

[2fastdre]

I am writing a "filesystem scanner" program that will collect statistics about files on a filesystem. I am using the java.io.File class, but the File class does not allow me to read File Access Timestamp. There is a lastModified() method, but there is no lastAccessed() method. Can anybody suggest on how to resolve this?

Thanks,
2FastDre.

[JGRobinson]

Hi,

The only thing that I can think of is to run a java system method which carries out an 'ls' on the file, and then decode the output of that 'ls' to get the relevant timestamp.

Hope this helps.
Graham

[2fastdre]

Could you provide a little more info or a small example on how to execute Java system commands, such as 'ls'?

Thanks!
Andre.

[JGRobinson]

Hi Andre,

here is some code which runs on Windows XP unfortuately I don't have unix or linix so cannot test it on that, but theoretically you should just be able to replace the "cmd /c dir" with "ls -u afile.txt" where afile.txt is the file you want the access time from.

package test;

import java.io.*;

public class TestExecute
{
    /**
     * @param args the command line arguments
     */
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        try
        {
             Runtime rt = Runtime.getRuntime();
             Process p = rt.exec("cmd /c dir");
       
             InputStream in = p.getInputStream();
             OutputStream out = p.getOutputStream();
             InputStream err = p.getErrorStream();
             int intread = in.read();
             char x;
             while(intread!=-1)
             {
                 x = (char)intread;
                 System.out.print( x + "");
                 intread = in.read();
             }

        }catch(Exception exc){/*handle exception*/}
        
    }
    
}

Hope this helps.
Graham