ls -le command shows the following: $ls -le total 64 -rwxrwxr-x 1 user1 cc_grp 442 Jul 30 08:31:11 2009 drop.sql -rw-r--r-- 1 user1 cc_grp 1330 Jul 15 06:56:32 2009 temp.sql Now I want the output as follows: $ls -le total 64 -rwxrwxr-x 1 user1 cc_grp 442 20090730083111 drop.sql -rw-r--r-- 1 user1 cc_grp 1330 20090715065632 temp.sql i.e the timestamp of files. This I need to compare the arrival of my new trigger files with the old ones. Can anyone help in getting this done?. Thanks

I do not think the ls command has an option to display the time stamp in that format. A shell or awk script is needed. If that is agreeable, I might be able to give you a solution. Let me know if that is agreeable.

Yes..nails, if that can be done using scripts, thats fine for me.

--time-style=STYLE with -l, show times using style STYLE: full-iso, long-iso, iso, locale, +FORMAT. FORMAT is interpreted like `date'; if FORMAT is FORMAT1<newline>FORMAT2, FORMAT1 applies to non-recent files and FORMAT2 to recent files; if STYLE is prefixed with `posix-', STYLE takes effect only outside the POSIX locale Might set system time to so that format. Might need full time. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, Make an autorun.inf folder on all usb drives.

two things: 1) I am not familiar with the -e option for ls. 2) I am using nawk instead of awk. #!/bin/ksh # cd /to/your/directory ls -le |nawk ' { mm=month_no($6) gsub(":","",$8) printf("%s %s %s %s %s %s%02d%02d%s %s\n", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $9, mm, $7, $8, $10) } function month_no(mm) { if(mm == "Jan") return 1 if(mm == "Feb") return 2 if(mm == "Mar") return 3 if(mm == "Apr") return 4 if(mm == "May") return 5 if(mm == "Jun") return 6 if(mm == "Jul") return 7 if(mm == "Aug") return 8 if(mm == "Sep") return 9 if(mm == "Oct") return 10 if(mm == "Nov") return 11 if(mm == "Dec") return 12 return 0 }'

thanks nails... it works well..can this be done in perl also?.

Yes, anything that can be done in awk can be done in perl - probably better. I'm not much of a perl programmer, but maybe I'll take a look at it later in the week.