I am a member of a perl discussion list but it seems to have gone away so I hope somebody here can give me an idea as to why the stat function is not working.
Create a file called testfile in your working directory and then run the following perl script: #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use warnings::unused; use File::stat; use File::Spec; my $last_update_time; $last_update_time = ( stat("testfile") )[9]; printf("%d\n",$last_update_time); As this stands, it should print a 10 or so digit number representing the number of seconds since Midnight UTC on January 1 of 1970. What it actually does is to not set the variable and you get the "Use of uninitialized variable" squawk with no value assignment to the variable. The [9] referrs to the ninth element in an array which should be the time stamp. Thanks for any suggestions. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ