Last accessed date/time

I have been told that servers do not store this flag on files. I want to 'audit' my sites and ensure that files stored are needed, so last accessed would be very useful. Does anyone have a trick to get this info without interminable trawling of raw access files?

If the Filesystem supports, you could use a perl script to interrogate each file with stat()
http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/stat.html

On a Linux box I use:

Perl
1	my($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,$atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat("/path/to/file");

atime (the variable $atime above) is the last access time in seconds since the epoch.

Perhaps use in a 'for' loop to test each file.

Many thanks, Panda - working on that.

You need to check that the atime field is maintained by the mounted file system.

In reference to unix.stackexchange.com/questions/8840/last-time-file-opened:

Updating the atime every time a file is read causes a lot of usually-unnecessary IO, slowing everything down. So, some Linux distributions now default to the noatime filesystem mount option, which basically kills atimes, or else relatime, which only updates atimes once a limit has passed (normally once per day) or if the file was actually modified since the previous read. You can find if these options are active by running the mount command.