Here's the promised v2.5.0 release of CompFileDate

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 parameters to the --compare command. Examples are --compare== for equality and --compare="<>" for inequality. You do need to remember to enclose < and > symbols in quotes though, otherwise some weird redirections happen!

The ability to compare a file's last accessed date has also been added.

See the Program Usage section of Docs/ReadMe.txt for details of expanded commands.

You can see all the changes in the change log.

👉 Download v2.5.0 from GitHub



Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are very welcome, but please be aware that I moderate all comments, so there will be a delay before your comment appears.

Advertising spam and the rare abusive, hateful or racist comments will be blocked and reported.

Finally, should you have a query about, or a bug report for, one of my programs or libraries please use the relevant issue tracker rather than posting a comment to report it.

Thanks

Popular posts from this blog

Initialising dynamic arrays

When writing some unit tests a while ago I found myself needing to initialise some dynamic arrays with test data. It would be nice if we could do something like this: var A : array of Integer ; begin A := ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) ; // !! WRONG end ; but we can't. So I decided to write some functions to initialise dynamic arrays to the contents of another array, be it a constant, a literal or another dynamic array. The result was a set of overloaded routines, one for each data type I needed to handle, for example for Integer and string arrays I had: function CloneArray ( const A : array of Integer ) : TIntegerDynArray ; overload ; var Idx : Integer ; begin SetLength ( Result , Length ( A ) ) ; for Idx := Low ( A ) to High ( A ) do Result [ Idx - Low ( A ) ] := A [ Idx ] ; end ; function CloneArray ( const A : array of string ) : TStringDynArray ; overload ; var Idx : Integer ; begin SetLength ( Result , Len...
Read more

New Array Utilities Library Unit released

Image
Yesterday I added a shiny new unit to the DelphiDabbler Code Library - the Array Utilities Unit . It lives in the ddablib/arrayutils  repo on GitHub. This unit, named DelphiDabbler.Lib.ArrayUtils.pas ,   provides a single "Advanced" record, TArrayUtils , that contains static methods that perform common operations on generic arrays. There are numerous overloaded versions of many of the methods. Every method operates on a given generic array that is passed as a parameter, either as an array of T or a TArray<T> . The unit requires Delphi XE or later. It has been tested with Delphi XE and Delphi 12. The code depends only on the Delphi RTL, so it should work for any platform supported by Delphi and be both VCL and FireMonkey compatible. I've only tested Windows 32 bit and 64 bit targets. There are far too many methods to describe in here, but you can find them all listed and explained in the comprehensive  online documentation . As a taster you'll find Methods that ...
Read more

Deleting elements from a dynamic array

In my blog " Initialising Dynamic Arrays " I mentioned I have been writing some unit tests that needed numerous repetative array initialisation operations. Well, one of the other common operations I found myself writing was the deletion of items from dynamic arrays. So I decided to find a generic way of doing this. Assuming we know the index of the item to be deleted we need the equivalent of Delphi's built-in Delete procedure for strings. If you read the previous post you won't be surprised to learn that I decided to further extend the Generics.Collections.TArray class by adding to the TArrayEx class I introduced there. My first attempt emulates Delphi's Delete procedure by deleting the array element in-place: i.e. it updates the array passed as a parameter. Unsurprisingly the method is called DeleteInPlace . Here's how it goes: type TArrayEx = class ( TArray ) public .. . class procedure DeleteInPlace < T > ( var A : ...
Read more