Working with Files: How to get the last updated date of a file using Node.js

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All the file functions in Node.js are provided by the fs module. This module exposes a method called statSync(), which gets the file details synchronously.

By calling it passing a file path (relative to the file location, or absolute), it will return an object that contains the mtime property.

That is a Date object instance that contains the file last modified date.

const fs = require('fs')

const getFileUpdatedDate = (path) => {
  const stats = fs.statSync(path)
  return stats.mtime
}

Check out the JavaScript Date guide to find out more how to handle the Date object, if you need.

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: How to check if a file exists in Node.js
2: How to create an empty file in Node.js
3: How to get the names of all the files in a folder in Node
4: ▶︎ How to get the last updated date of a file using Node.js
5: How to remove a file with Node.js
6: How to write a JSON object to file in Node.js
7: How to empty a folder in Node.js
8: Working with file descriptors in Node
9: Node File Paths
10: Node file stats
11: Working with folders in Node
12: How to use the Node.js fs module with async/await
13: How to get the current folder in Node
14: How to get the file extension in Node.js from the MIME type
15: How to get the file extension in Node.js
16: How to list files in a folder in Node
17: How to mass rename files in Node.js
18: Node.js get all files in a folder recursively
19: Incrementing multiple folders numbers at once using Node.js
20: Save some text to a file in Node.js