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I am trying to get the date that a file was uploaded to an FTP server by evaluating the file's "last modified" attribute. The FTP server has recently been made private, but its files are still accessible via HTTPS.

Currently, I am navigating to the the file in Chrome using https:// and then typing javascript:alert(document.lastModified) into the URL to obtain a pop-up with the document's last modified date and time. This method was obtained from: https://stackoverflow.com/a/36377951/4736556.

Does anybody know for sure that querying the lastModified attribute of a web document using the JavaScript method above will give me the same "last modified" timestamp that I would get if I had access to the (now inaccessible) FTP server? That being said, does that "last modified" timestamp of an online document mean that's when it was uploaded to the FTP server?

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jshapy8
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1 Answers1

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Querying lastModified will give you whatever time the HTTP server provided for the page.

Whether that corresponds to a source file on the server, or whether it is retrieved from another resource, or even calculated on the fly, depends completely on the web server and its configuration.

Martin Prikryl
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