In an earlier article, we learned how to change the file’s last modified date in Java.

In this article, we shall look at different ways to get the last modified date of a file using Java.

In Java 7 or higher, you can use the Files.getLastModifiedTime() method to get the last modified date of a file, as shown below:

try {
    Path path = Paths.get("input.txt");

    // print last modified date
    System.out.println("Last Modified Date: " + Files.getLastModifiedTime(path));

} catch (IOException ex){
    ex.printStackTrace();
}

Here is the output of the above code:

Last Modified Date: 2022-10-01T18:20:11Z

In older Java versions (Java 6 or below), File.lastModified() can be used to get the file’s last modified date, as shown below:

File file = new File("input.txt");

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("MM-dd-yyyy HH:mm:ss");

// print last modified date
System.out.println("Last Modified Date: " + sdf.format(file.lastModified()));

Further Reading

You may be interested in other Java I/O articles: