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From: phil@titan.rice.edu@rice.EDU (William LeFebvre)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: oddball suggestion
Message-ID: <455@dione.rice.EDU>
Date: Fri, 12-Jun-87 15:54:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: dione.455
Posted: Fri Jun 12 15:54:00 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jun-87 05:47:44 EDT
Sender: root@rice.EDU
Reply-To: phil@rice.edu (William LeFebvre)
Followup-To: comp.text
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Lines: 41
Keywords: time, file modified times

I originally posted this to the ARPANet list "TeXHax", then decided that
this might be of interest to comp.text readers:

I have a rather oddball off-the-cuff suggestion for TeX or any other
text processor.  On several occasions I have thought about how nice it
would be to have this feature, but I have never actually seen a text
processor that has it.

TeX has "\time", "\day", "\month", and "\year" which all reflect the
current time.  But if you use this to generate a date in a document
(such as a letter), it will reflect the last time the document was
processed with TeX.  I would like to see, instead of or (better yet) in
addition to, a variable that reflects the last modified time of the
base input file (or the most recent modified time of all input files).
Why?  Well, I don't keep DVI files around because of disk space
reasons.  If I need it again, I can just generate it from the TeX
source, right?  Well.....all except the date.

I just recently printed a copy of a correspondence letter to put in my
hardcopy file at home.  Unfortunately, I had sent the actual letter
about a week earlier and had subsequently deleted the DVI file.  So, I
was forced to go in and change the date used in the letter from the
automatically generated one to the actual date the letter was sent so
that my file copy would be identical to the one I had sent.

I have encountered a similar problem with my thesis proposal:  almost
two months after I had printed the final copy (and after I had deleted
the DVI file), someone asked me for a copy of it.  The easiest thing to
do was print off a new copy.  But the date on the title page was wrong.

In both cases, if the date was based on the last modified time of the
file, I would have gotten exactly what I wanted.

			William LeFebvre
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil@Rice.edu>
			William LeFebvre
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil@Rice.edu>