phil@titan.rice.edu@rice.EDU (William LeFebvre) (06/12/87)
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>
mao@blipyramid.BLI.COM (Mike Olson) (06/17/87)
In article <455@dione.rice.EDU>, William LeFebvre writes
that he'd like to be able to print the mod date of an input file
under tex, rather than just the date of printing.
we do this with troff. all of our document source files are under rcs control.
you could also use sccs. we define a macro RV that extracts the date info,
and then include a line
.RV $Header$
in the file before checking it in. rcs inserts the mod date in the header
line. you might be able to come up with a similar scheme for tex.
mike olson
britton lee, inc.
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