How to get the last modified date and time of a file or directory in Java

Sometimes before processing a file, you want to check it's last modified date to avoid processing an old file. Though some programmers prefer to attach date in the file name itself, I don't find it a cleaner approach. For example, suppose you are downloading closing prices of stocks and processing at the start of the day and loading into the database. In order to accidently process an old file, you can check the last modified date before processing and if it's in the acceptable range, you can process the file. You can get the last modified date of a file in Java by using java.io.File class. This is a class which represents both file and directory in Java. It contains a method called lastModified() which returns the last modified date of the file. This method returns a long millisecond epoch value, which you can convert to more readable dd MM yyyy HH:mm:sss format by using the SimpleDateFormat class of JDK.  In this article, I'll tell you how to get the last modified date of file and directory in Java.

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