Question: I am new to PHP and am writing a PHP script that contains `a module which reads the file timestamp out of a file and then compare with system time to see whether the file is older than 5 minutes or not and I am wondering how that can be achieved`. I am currently using

```
$timeStamp = strftime('%c', filectime($this->localPath));
$timeStamp2 = filectime($this->localPath);

```

The two `$timeStamp` and `$timeStamp2` are different, the 1st one is more human readable

```
$timeStamp Mon Jun 20 15:17:01 2011
$timeStamp2 1308608221 

```

What does `$timeStamp2` mean?

And again, how to see if `the file is more than 5 minutes old?`

Answer: 
That is **Unix timestamp** actually (seconds since 1st jan 1970 or EPOCH)

You can use [time() function](http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.time.php) to get current time in same Unix format.

And then subtract both time values to check whether difference is > 300 (5 min) or not.
Answering your question "What does $timeStamp2 mean?"

`1308608221` is the number of seconds that have passed since midnight January 1,1970.