DelphiDabbler's Blog

As I hinted in the previous post, another new release of my rather niche file date comparison utility has escaped into the wild. This one's v2.5.0. After releasing v2.4.0 I was browsing Delphi's RTL code that reads file dates and found that, when requesting the file creation date for Linux, the code actually returns the status changed date. After some research I found that most Linux file systems don't support the creation date and stat(2)  API calls doesn't provide it anyway. To fix this I added a new command option, for Linux only, to explicitly read the status changed date instead of using the misleading creation date option. I also greatly expanded the number of aliases for date types, mainly because I keep guessing the correct options (slightly) incorrectly. Having more aliases increases the likelihood of guessing correctly without having to RTFM.  Additional aliases for comparison operators were also added, including the ability to specify arithmetic operators as ...

Hot on the heels of the release of v2.3.0 of CompFileDate , my file date comparison utility, comes v2.4.0. The main thing about this release is that I've managed to build a Linux version. That's a first for me. This release ends 30+ years of Windows only programming! There's a new script that creates debug builds for all OS targets, to save having to build them all separately from the IDE, but no other new functionality. You can see all the changes in this version's change log . 👉  Download v2.4.0 from GitHub And here we are, running on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (on Windows 11 WSL2) Don't tell anyone, but there might just be a 2.5.0 release before too long, because I had an idea for a couple of new options just as I was pushing out this release. But then again, there might not. 

What a time I've had since Christmas: a mild cold, then a weird dose of flu followed by a nasty cold that I can't shake off. Marvellous way to start the year. Still, when I'm not well I often do a bit of coding to take my mind of things, so here's a new release of CompFileDate that compares file dates! It's very simple. It can compare either file creation or modification dates of two files using any of the <, <=, =, <>, > or >= operators. It returns 0 if the comparison fails, 1 if it succeeds and >= 100 on error. It can optionally follow Windows shortcuts (i.e. .lnk files). That's it. It's designed for use it batch files. The program is open source (MPL 2.0) with source available from the ddabapps/compfiledate repo on GitHub. You will also find installation and usage instructions in that repo's Docs/ReadMe.txt file and can read about this release's changes in CHANGELOG.md . 👉 Download v2.3.0 from GitHub