Changing the system clock is a very bad idea, but I guess you figured that out and sent the message anyway. This means that you need a beer. I think the method I came up with is OK, but if there were a way to tell perl not to change the timestamp when the -i option is used, that would be better. I guess this is telling me, but I don't understand it: http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t890336-preserve-timestamp.html which leads me here: http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/utime.html And I don't knoww what to do with that, so I might just stick to what I did last time. ;-) Mike On Fri, 6 Sep 2013, Jeremy MountainJohnson wrote: > In Python the os module should have something to modify it (one would > think so since it can read this fs meta). If not, you could write a > script to change the system clock to the original read time stamp of > the file, modify the file, than change the clock back- would do the > job of maintaining the modified attribute. Heh, probably not easier, > but the best my work wired mind could come up with on a Friday :-) > -- > Jeremy MountainJohnson > Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com > > > On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 5:17 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: >> I don't know the best way to do this. I wanted to change some files but I >> wanted to keep the original timestamps. So I did it this way: >> >> # get the timestamp >> TIME_STRING=$(date -d "$(stat -c %y FILE)" +"%Y%m%d%H%M.%S") >> >> make changes to FILE >> >> # change the timestamp back to what it was before the change >> touch -t $TIME_STRING FILE >> >> >> My use was something like this: >> >> for FILE in $(grep -l FOO) ; do >> TIME_STRING=$(date -d "$(stat -c %y "$FILE")" +"%Y%m%d%H%M.%S") >> perl -pi -e 's/FOO/BAR/' "$FILE" >> touch -t $TIME_STRING "$FILE" >> done >> >> >> So how do you all do this kind of thing? >> >> Mike >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >