How to update the "last update" date in text files automatically according their modification date in OS? - automation

Question

There are sevaral source files in VHDL. All files have a header which gives the file name, creation date and description among other things. One of these things is the last update date. All files are version controlled in Git.
What happens is that often the files are modified, commited and pushed up. However, the last update date is not updated often. This happens by mistake since so many different files are worked on at different times and one might forget to always change the "last update" part of the file header to the latest date when it has actually been changed.
I want to automate this process and believe there are many different ways to do this.
A script of some sort, must check the last update date in the text file header. Then, if it is different from the actual last modified date that can be accessed through properties of the file in the file-system, the last update date in the text must be updated to the last modified date value. What would be the most optimal way to do this? A Python script, Bash script or something else?
Basically I want to do this when the files are being commited into Git. It should ideally happen automatically but running one line in terminal to execute script is not a big deal perhaps. The check is required on the files that are being commited and pushed up.

Answer 1

I'm not a Python programmer, but I made a little script to hopefully help you out. Maybe this fits your needs.
What the script should do:
Get all files form the path (here c:\Python) which have the extension .vdhl
Loop over the files and extract the date from line 9 via regex
Get the last modified date from the file
If last modified > then the date in the file, then update the file
import os
import re
import glob
import datetime
path = r"c:\Python"
mylist = [f for f in glob.glob("*.vhdl")]
print(mylist)
for i in mylist:
filepath = os.path.join(path, i)
with open(filepath, 'r+') as f:
content = f.read()
last_update = re.findall("Last\supdate\:\s+(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})", content)
modified = os.path.getmtime(filepath)
modified_readable = str(datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(modified))[:10]
#print(content)
#print(last_update)
#print(modified_readable)
#print("Date modified:", datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(modified))
if (modified_readable > last_update[0]):
print(filepath, 'UPDATE')
text = re.sub(last_update[0], modified_readable, content)
f.seek(0)
f.write(text)
f.truncate()
else:
print(filepath, 'NO CHANGE')