How to Get the Last Modified Date of a File in Python

In this article, we show how to get the last modified date of a file in Python.

We can do this using the Python os module.

So the first thing we have to do is import the os module into the script.

We use this module to retrieve a file and then display certain attributes. In the case of this program, we are going to retrieve the file's last modified date.

So below is the script that allows us to obtain the last modified date of a file named file.txt.

>>> import os >>> lastmodified= os.stat('file.txt').st_mtime >>> print(lastmodified) 1496470668.2637396

So this works.

It returns the last modified date of a file. However, the time is returned as a timestamp, which may be easy for computers to understand but that aren't very human readable.

Thus, more than likely, you want to return a more human readable version. Therefore, you would want to convert this timestamp into datetime. Timestamp isn't very human readable; datetime is.

Therefore, below, we show the code where we return the last modified date of a file in datetime.

>>> import os >>> from datetime import datetime >>> lastmodified= os.stat('file.txt').st_mtime >>> print(datetime.fromtimestamp(lastmodified)) 2017-06-03 02:17:48.263740

So now we have the last modified date of the file as a datetime, which is a lot more human readable than a timestamp.

And this is all that is required to get the last modified date of a file in Python.

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