   Get the time stamp of a file?
  I need to get the time stamp of a file periodically in my application so I know whether it had been updated. Is there any way to do this, cross-platform, using C++?   
  You can try  boost::filesystem's last_write_time().   ;  Thanks! That would work great, but I would prefer to use as few external libraries as possible. Is there a way to do this with standard C++ libraries one can assume are available on Linux, Windows, and OSX (like std::string, std::ifstream, and so on)?   ;  File operations are operating system specific. Either your stuck using the operating systems API, or you gotta use a cross platform library such as SiCrane's boost suggestion.   ;  Darn. I was hoping it would be like ifstream, sure it's different for each platform, but they share a common interface and are used in the exact same way on any platform.   ;  But the streams interfaces do not assume they are referring to actual files. For example, cin and cout, for which a last-modified time would not make sense in a way consistent with a file's last access time, or a stream pointing at an internal memory buffer, where a last access time would not even be stored.   ;  Ah, I get it now. Thank you all, especially SiCrane. You can see the results of your help in video number 5 here:www.esnips.com/web/rf2Should simplify game development quite a bit when finished (it is a free/open source software game creation suite).   ;  pseudocode:#if defined(WIN32)GetFileInformationByHandle(...);#elsestat(...);#endifstat works on Linux and MacOS as far as I know, you'll have to fit the information in your own data structure if you want to return the value or otherwise use it outside the function.   