To get the last modified time of a file synchronously, you can use the statSync()
method from the fs
(filesystem) module and then use the mtime
property from the returned stats
object in Node.js.
Let's say we have a file called myFile.txt
in which you want to get the last modified time. Here you can use the fs.statSync()
method and pass:
- the
path
to the file as an argument. - the method returns a
stats
object where we can use the property calledmtime
to get the last modified time.
The mtime
property returns a valid Date
object in JavaScript
It can be done like this,
// require fs module
const fs = require("fs");
// get last modified time using fs.statSync() method
const stats = fs.statSync("./myFile.txt");
// get modified time of the file
const modifiedTime = stats.mtime;
console.log("File last modified at: ", modifiedTime); // File last modified at: 2021-04-30T23:53:07.633Z
See the above code live in repl.it.
If you want to see the Date
in a more human-readable way you can use the Date
object methods. Let's use the toUTCString()
method like this,
// require fs module
const fs = require("fs");
// get last modified time using fs.statSync() method
const stats = fs.statSync("./myFile.txt");
// get modified time of the file
const modifiedTime = stats.mtime;
console.log("File last modified at: ", modifiedTime.toUTCString()); // File last modified at: Fri, 30 Apr 2021 23:53:07 GMT
That's it! 😀