Question: I have a standalone version of Perl for Windows (5.004) that does not include any modules. I want to run a script to check the last modified time of several files.

I could use `File::qstat`, but that module doesn't exist (the copy of Perl is in version control, so it can be used by people who do not have [ActivePerl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivePerl) or [Strawberry Perl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Perl) installed).

It seems like there are three options:

1. Figure out how to put a newer, more functional, standalone Perl installation into version control
2. Just add the File::Stat module somehow, and do `use lib` (does that work on 5.004?)
3. Use some built-in functions included in 5.004 for Windows to get the file status.

How can I do this?

Answer: 
```
perl -le '$file=shift or die;print scalar localtime((stat($file))[9])' file

```

See [stat](http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/stat.html) .
Why on earth are you stuck using Perl 5.004? I have source from Perl 5.5.3 dated in 1999, so Perl 5.004 is likely to be several years older than that. (I found source for Perl 5.004\_04 after all; the latest timestamp in that was 1997-10-15 06:46.) So, that's about 15 years old.

The `stat` function is likely to exist and do the job you need.