Increment access time of file

Question

I would like to increment the access time of a file by a given number of hours, e.g. 12 hours.

I found a way to hack it using Unxutils touch.exe tool and calculate the new date manually:

touch.exe -a -t MMDDhhmmCCYY my_file.txt

However, I would like to automatize this without having to enter the new date manually. So here are my questions:

How can I retrieve the access time of a file in DOS?
How can I increment it?
How can I put that together into a script/batch-file?
Or are there better approaches?

Thanks a lot!

mjolinor · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-08 22:11:44Z

3

Since you've got it tagged for Powershell:

$file = Get-ChildItem testfile.txt
$file.lastwritetime

$file.LastWriteTime = ($file.LastWriteTime).AddHours(12)
$file.LastWriteTime

Tuesday, November 19, 2013 5:27:18 PM
Wednesday, November 20, 2013 5:27:18 AM

answered Dec 8, 2013 at 22:11

mjolinor

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1 Comment

nohwnd Over a year ago

This won't work for more than one file, since you are using the Get-ChildItem it is just matter of changing the filter to save more than one file in the $file variable. This is how it may be done for more files.

$file = Get-ChildItem -path \temp -filter *.log; $file | foreach {  	$_.LastWriteTime = ($_.LastWriteTime).AddHours(12); 	$_.LastWriteTime }

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:57:32Z

1

You can get the last access time in batch using this example:

for /f %%A in ( ' dir /b /TA "c:\test.txt" ' ) do set accesstime=%%~tA
echo %accesstime%

but then to increment it correctly, you are going to have to do something like this: Adding to %TIME% variable in windows cmd script

And account for jumping dates, etc.

In powershell, you can read and write the LastAccessTime of a file like so:

$file = Get-Item "c:\test.txt"
$file.LastAccessTime = ($file.LastAccessTime).AddHours(12)

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:57

CommunityBot

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answered Dec 8, 2013 at 23:02

malexander

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