Age of files/format?

[silentguy]

Hi!
I have a library full of fanfiction what mostly came as txt files with a few html files mixed in. I converted all of them to epub to better work on my reader.
From time to time I have to append to some of the text documents and I try to remember to recreate the epub immediately, but i fear I might not have been consequent about that.
I was wondering if there is any way to search for books with text files that are newer then the epub files. Or books where epub is not the newest of the files, or anything else related to age of books.

I'm assuming this is to close to the file level, but I thought I'd ask.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by silentguy

Hi!
I have a library full of fanfiction what mostly came as txt files with a few html files mixed in. I converted all of them to epub to better work on my reader.
From time to time I have to append to some of the text documents and I try to remember to recreate the epub immediately, but i fear I might not have been consequent about that.
I was wondering if there is any way to search for books with text files that are newer then the epub files. Or books where epub is not the newest of the files, or anything else related to age of books.

I'm assuming this is to close to the file level, but I thought I'd ask.

All I know is you can hover over the format in the metadata editor and see the 'filesystem modified' timestamp

In the GUI Date is the (default) timestamp the record was created
There is also a 'Modified' timestamp that belongs to the books metadata

[chaley]

Originally Posted by silentguy

Hi!
I have a library full of fanfiction what mostly came as txt files with a few html files mixed in. I converted all of them to epub to better work on my reader.
From time to time I have to append to some of the text documents and I try to remember to recreate the epub immediately, but i fear I might not have been consequent about that.
I was wondering if there is any way to search for books with text files that are newer then the epub files. Or books where epub is not the newest of the files, or anything else related to age of books.

Calibre does not support multi-field search expressions, so you cannot search for format1 newer than format2.

What you can do, in order of ease:
- Display the mod dates for all the formats of a book. Create a composite custom column (column made from other columns) and use the template "{formats_modtimes(yyyyMMdd)}". Change the date format string (yyyy etc) to be what you want).
- If you have a small known number of formats, then create a composite custom column for each format. There is a post somewhere on the forumn with the template. This would permit you to sort format by format.
- Create a custom template function to give you the information you want. This requires a fair amount of technical expertise, but the custom function can compare the modtimes of the formats and return the indication you want to see. For example, it could return the extension of the newest format, whether epub is older than some other format, the list of formats sorted in modtime order, or what-have-you.

Of course, you could write a program that does this on the file system, which may or may not be easier to do than the custom template function.

[silentguy]

thanks! formats_modtimes was pretty much what i was looking for. I created a custom column with some template magic and now i have a column a note if the txt or zip is newer then the epub. Got more matches that i expected, but they all were acurate