Today I was working on a script, and one of the subroutines needed simple seconds-based arithmetics with time. As you probably remember from my date and time in Unix scripts article, the easiest way to approach this task is to deal with the raw representation of date and time in Unix – the Unix epoch times. This post will show you how to convert standard dates into Unix epoch times in Perl.
Perl
Perl Scripting: Check If a File Exists
It's not often that I write about Perl Scripting on Unix Tutorial, but that's just because I don't script in Perl this much on a regular basis. Today, however, I'd like to share one of the building blocks – a really basic piece of functionality which you'll find really useful in almost any Perl script.
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How To Find Out a File Type and Permissions in Perl
A few months ago, I've given a really simple example of using Perl for parsing directory trees in Unix. If you looked closer at it, you would have noticed that the script was working fine, but showing file modes as strange large numbers which didn't look like the usual file permissions you would expect. Today I'm going to explain why this happens, and show you how to find out a user type in Perl.
lstat and stat functions, return, among other things, the file mode value. While it looks confusing initially, it is in fact quite simply a combination field, which includes both the file type and all the permissions for it. If you print this field as a single decimal number, you will not recognize it, but if you simply convert it to octal, you will immediately start seeing the pattern:
Mysterious mode 33261 from the example below becomes 100755 when converted into octal, and you can easily see then the permission part of it: 0755.
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