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badavadapav
Asked: 2020-04-15 05:58:17 +0800 CST

How to print last modified time of a file using | in BASH?

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I am a novice in BASH coding. Is there any way I can print last modified time of a file (say photos) to a text file named last-modified.txt

I tried searching around a bit and could accomplish the task using the following code

stat -c %y photos >> last-modified.txt

However, I want to use | to accomplish the task

EDIT: The aforementioned command (involving >> or append) works well but I was curious to know if I can accomplish the same result by something like stat -c %y photos | cat last-modified.txt (Although I know this won't work but you get the idea what I am trying to achieve here).

command-line bash stat

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Use tee:

    tee - read from standard input and write to standard output and files

    Append to file:

    stat -c %y photos | tee -a last-modified.txt

    or overwrite file:

    stat -c %y photos | tee last-modified.txt

    This is especially useful if you (1) want to keep the output on the screen or (2) need to write to a file using sudo, then you can use ... | sudo tee ...

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