Unix command (other than 'stat' and 'ls') to get file modification date without parsing

How about using the find command?

e.g.,

 $ find filenname -maxdepth 0 -printf "%TY-%Tm-%Td %TH:%TM\n"

This particular format string gives output like this: 2012-06-13 00:05.

The find man page shows the formatting directives you can use with printf to tailor the output to what you need/want. Section -printf format contains all the details.

Compare ls output to find:

$ ls -l uname.txt | awk '{print  $6 , "", $7}'
2012-06-13  00:05

$ find uname.txt -maxdepth 0 -printf "%TY-%Tm-%Td %TH:%TM\n"
2012-06-13 00:05

Of course you can write scripts in any number of languages such a Python or Perl etc, to get the same information, however asking for a "unix command" sounded as if you were looking for a "built-in" shell command.

EDIT:

You could also inovke Python from the command line like this:

$ python -c "import os,time; print time.ctime(os.path.getmtime('uname.txt'))"

or if combined with other shell commands:

$ echo 'uname.txt' | xargs python -c "import os,time,sys; print time.ctime(os.path.getmtime(sys.argv[1]))"

both return: Wed Jun 13 00:05:29 2012

depending on your OS you could just use

date -r FILENAME

The only version of unix this doesn't appear to work on is Mac OS, where according to the man files, the -r option is :

 -r seconds
         Print the date and time represented by seconds, where seconds is
         the number of seconds since the Epoch (00:00:00 UTC, January 1,
         1970; see time(3)), and can be specified in decimal, octal, or
         hex.

instead of

   -r, --reference=FILE
          display the last modification time of FILE

Do you have perl?

If so, you can use its built-in stat function to get the mtime (and other information) about a named file.

Here's a small script that takes a list of files and prints the modification time for each one:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

foreach my $file (@ARGV) {
    my @stat = stat $file;
    if (@stat) {
        print scalar localtime $stat[9], " $file\n";
    }
    else {
        warn "$file: $!\n";
    }
}

Sample output:

$ ./mtime.pl ./mtime.pl nosuchfile
Tue Jun 26 14:58:17 2012 ./mtime.pl
nosuchfile: No such file or directory

The File::stat module overrides the stat call with a more user-friendly version:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use File::stat;

foreach my $file (@ARGV) {
    my $stat = stat $file;
    if ($stat) {
        print scalar localtime $stat->mtime, " $file\n";
    }
    else {
        warn "$file: $!\n";
    }
}