Get file modified date & time

We can get file last modified date/time from Windows command line using dir or forfiles commands.

Using Dir command:

dir /T:W  filename

For example, to get the last modified time for the file ‘E:\commands.docx’ the command would be:

dir /T:W  e:\commands.docx

To get the modified date and time for all files and sub folders in the current directory the command would be:

dir /T:W

To get modified date/time only for files in the current directory(i.e exclude directories from files)

dir /T:W  /A:-D

Using Forfiles command

Using forfiles command we can get modified date and time for all the files in a directory.

forfiles /C "cmd /c echo @file @fdate @ftime"

We can restrict the command only to certain files using * command. For example, to get modified time/date only for pdf files, we can use the below command.

forfiles /M *.pdf /C "cmd /c echo @file @fdate @ftime"

How to find the last modified file in a directory?

You can run the below command to find the latest modified file in a directory. It would print the list of files in the order of file modified time. It would print the recently modified file at the bottom.

dir /O:D /T:W /A:-D

/O:D   will make the command print the files list using the file date/time attributes.
/T:W  will make the command use file modified time.
/A:-D will make it to print only files.

For more examples on dir command, check this post:  Dir command syntax and examples