Pls I urgent need someone to help with setting the timestamp format so that ls -l or ll on files created or modified have the year (eg 2004) as part of the timestamp Rgds John

Hi: Every unix/linux variant I've used sets the 8th field of 'ls -l' to the time if the file is created in the last 6 months. I don't know of a way of changing this. I ran the ls -l thru an awk script and if the eighth field has a ":" I change it to the current year. that is, unless the 6th field is greater than the current month signifying the last half of last year. Then I subtract one from the current year. I'm using nawk; You may to change this to awk: #!/bin/ksh integer xmon integer xyear date '+%m %Y'|read xmon xyear ls -l |nawk ' { if(index($8, ":") ) { if(month_no($6) > mm) $8=yy-1 else $8=yy } printf("%s\n", $0) } function month_no(mm) { if(mm == "Jan") return 1 if(mm == "Feb") return 2 if(mm == "Mar") return 3 if(mm == "Apr") return 4 if(mm == "May") return 5 if(mm == "Jun") return 6 if(mm == "Jul") return 7 if(mm == "Aug") return 8 if(mm == "Sep") return 9 if(mm == "Oct") return 10 if(mm == "Nov") return 11 if(mm == "Dec") return 12 return 0 } ' mm="$xmon" yy="$xyear"