How to get date string from stat command?

Question

I have this to get the timestamp of a directory:

stat -c %Y directory_name

What can I pipe this to, to get the date formatted like this?

20220201

Answer 1

That stat -c %Y is specific to the GNU implementation of stat. If have GNU stat on your Solaris machine, it's likely you'll also have GNU find where you can just do:

gfind dir -prune -printf '%TY%Tm%Td\n'

You'll probably also have GNU date, with which you can do:

gdate -r dir +%Y%m%d

(though beware that if dir is a symlink, it will give you the modification time of its target, not the symlink itself).

Solaris also comes with zsh which has its own stat builtin (and has had long before a stat utility was added to GNU coreutils) where you can do:

zmodload zsh/stat
stat -LF %Y%m%d +mtime dir

Answer 2

date --date=@$(stat -c %Y directory_name) +%Y%m%d

Answer 3

You can embed it into a date command, e.g.:

date -d "@$(stat -c %Y directory_name)" +%Y%m%d

But beware stat -c is a GNU extension, doesn't work elsewhere...

Answer 4

Try this with printf:

$ printf '%(%Y%m%d)T\n' "#$(stat -c %Y dir)"
20220127