I'm trying to make a script, that takes a folder as input, and deletes files older than one week. For some reason, my program does not output expected values.
I used:
os.stat('testFile1.txt').st_mtime
os.stat('testFile1.txt').st_atime
I expected atime to return the time the file was last accessed, and mtime last modification, in seconds.
I get a really high number on both, even though I have just opened a file.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I use another method to get the time?
The number you are getting is a timestamp in Unix format. It represents the number of seconds since the start of the year 1970 in UTC (that's why it's so big).
In order to convert it to something more usable, you can use datetime.fromtimestamp():
from datetime import datetime
filename = "testFile1.txt"
file_stat = os.stat(filename)
last_modification = datetime.fromtimestamp(file_stat.st_mtime)
last_access = datetime.fromtimestamp(file_stat.st_atime)
The time you are getting here is not "since the last change". In order to get the amount of time that has passed since a modification or access, you'll need to subtract the modification / access time from the current time:
current_time = datetime.now()
time_since_last_modification = current_time - last_modification
time_since_last_access = current_time - last_access
The code above results in two timedelta objects. In your application, you will need to convert those to days, which is trivial:
days_since_last_modification = time_since_last_modification.days
days_since_last_access = time_since_last_access.days
To summarize, this code:
from datetime import datetime
filename = "testFile1.txt"
file_stat = os.stat(filename)
last_modification = datetime.fromtimestamp(file_stat.st_mtime)
last_access = datetime.fromtimestamp(file_stat.st_atime)
current_time = datetime.now()
time_since_last_modification = current_time - last_modification
time_since_last_access = current_time - last_access
days_since_last_modification = time_since_last_modification.days
days_since_last_access = time_since_last_access.days
msg = "{} was modified {} days ago, with last access {} days ago"
msg = msg.format(filename, days_since_last_modification,
days_since_last_access)
print(msg)
Will output something along the lines:
testFile1.txt was modified 4 days ago, last access was 2 days ago
I believe you are not converting epoch time to datetime From https://docs.python.org/2/library/stat.html
stat.ST_ATIME - Time of last access
time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', time.localtime(os.stat('/tmp/test.txt').st_atime))
>>>'2018-01-15 14:51:23'
stat.ST_MTIME - Time of last modification
time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', time.localtime(os.stat('/tmp/test.txt').st_mtime))
>>>'2018-01-15 14:51:25'
You can even check metadta changes to a file using stat.ST_CTIME
For clarification:
| st_atime
| time of last access
| st_ctime
| time of last change
| st_mtime
| time of last modification
You are getting timestamps. I guess you want it as datetime instead? From that you can use timedelta to find out how old a datetime is.
import os
import datetime
datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.stat("test").st_mtime)
datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.stat("test").st_mtime)
Gives output:
datetime.datetime(2018, 1, 11, 8, 23, 23, 913330)
datetime.timedelta(4, 7252, 17055)
From input data:
drobban@xps:~/Desktop$ ls -lrt test
-rw-rw-r-- 1 drobban drobban 0 jan 11 08:23 test
