title: How do I get the last modified date of a directory in Amazon S3?
body: <p>So I'm aware that Amazon S3 doesn't really have directories. My question is: does this make it impossible to reliably get the last-modified timestamp of a "directory" in S3?</p>
  
  <p>I know you can get the last-modified date of a file, as in <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9679344/how-can-i-get-last-modified-datetime-of-s3-objects-with-boto">this</a> question.</p>
  
  <p>I say "reliably" because it would be possible to define the latest last-modified timestamp of a file inside a directory as the last-modified timestamp of the directory. But that's not really accurate, since if a file inside a directory gets deleted, it wouldn't register as a change to that directory (indeed the deletion might cause the last-modified date to go backwards in time).</p>
  
  <p>We're using <code>boto</code> to scrape S3.</p>