Editing a file and preserving Modified Time
Suppose you want to edit a file but not change the time modified - how do you do this? This could be useful for Blosxom bloggers, who want to edit their posts, without changing the order they are viewed on a page. Well, I came up with a solution in ksh:
#/bin/ksh
if [ test -a $1 ]
then
MTIME=`stat -t %Y%m%d%H%M.%S $1 | cut -d" " -f 9| sed 's/\"//g'`
else
MTIME=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M.%S`
fi
if [ "$EDITOR" = "" ]
then
pico $1
else
$EDITOR $1
fi
touch -t `echo $MTIME` $1
How to use it
Copy the above code and paste it into a file called 'blog'. Now make the file executable with chmod, thus:
$ chmod u+x blog
You can now re-edit old blog entries like this:
$ ./blog path/to/blog-post.txt
When you save and exit your editor will touch the file to update the modified time. Immediately afterwards the script will re-set the modified time back to what it was before editing.
User jlromano pointed out that you can do the same with perl, like this:
#!/usr/pkg/bin/perl
($accessTime, $modifiedTime) = (stat($ARGV[0]))[8,9];
system("$ENV{EDITOR} $ARGV[0]");
utime $accessTime, $modifiedTime, $ARGV[0];
Do you have a better way of doing this? Let me know!
