Directory date time

[mrdebug]

Hi, is there a way to change a directory (not a file) date time?

[Kent-Dorfman]

not thru Qt, but directories are themselves files, so it is possible.

[JonB]

@mrdebug
Speaking for Linux. You can indirectly modify a directory time by adding or deleting (or renaming?) a file/sub-directory inside it. I don't have access to Linux atm, but I believe touch [-t ...] will alter a directory's timestamp.

So the utime(2) system call must work on directories and be callable from your C++ code. I don't know whether Qt provides an interface for this (perhaps not).

For Windows I don't know what's available.

[JoeCFD]

on Windows
attrib -r +s +h "C:\path\to\directory" and then
forfiles /p "C:\path\to\directory" /s /m * /c "cmd /c echo @fdate @ftime @path"

on LInux
touch -d "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" /path/to/directory or
touch -t "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" /path/to/directory

[mrdebug]

Hi, in order to edit the date time of a directory there isn't a Qt way up to now.

On unix this is a working approach:

            utimbuf times;
            times.actime= QDTLastAccess.toTime_t();
            times.modtime= QDTLastWrite.toTime_t();
            bool Result= utime(FileOut.toStdString().c_str(), &times)== 0;

On Windows (the TimetToFileTime() function is taken from MIcrosoft technet):

            FILETIME FTCreation;
            FILETIME FTLastAccess;
            FILETIME FTLastWrite;
            TimetToFileTime(QDTCreation.toTime_t(), &FTCreation);
            TimetToFileTime(QDTLastAccess.toTime_t(), &FTLastAccess);
            TimetToFileTime(QDTLastWrite.toTime_t(), &FTLastWrite);
            HANDLE h;
            h= CreateFileA(FileOut.toStdString().c_str(), GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE, FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE, nullptr, OPEN_EXISTING, FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTICS, nullptr);
            if (h!= INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) {
                Result= SetFileTime(h, &FTCreation, &FTLastAccess, &FTLastWrite);
                CloseHandle(h);
            }

[Kent-Dorfman]

Which is fine for academic curiosity but @JoeCFD mentioned the most straight forward mechanism.

[JonB]

@Kent-Dorfman
Except that the OP did not say they just wanted a command-line way to do it, I thought they meant they wanted to be able to do it in code from a Qt program :)