mjhjmtu

I want to check whether link lnkfile is older than a regular reference file reffile.

The bash test builtin dereferences links, so test lnkfile -ot reffile compares the target of lnkfile, not the link itself.

Is there a way to make the test builtin not follow symlinks? Otherwise, how can I compare the time of a symlink?

I don't think there is a way with test, but you could use find.

test "$(find reffile -prune -newer lnkfile)" && command

Here, find returns output if lnkfile is older than reffile. test without an option is equivalent to test -n. This is true if the length of the string is nonzero. Hence, if there is output from find, command is executed.

In the comments, I was asked to make a comparison of this solution vs. stat. Firstly, I find the stat approach perfectly fine.

I did a benchmark to compare. I repeated the test a few times, alternating, and got similar results.

$ time (for i in 1..1000; do test "$(stat --format=%Z a)" -lt "$(stat --format=%Z b)" && echo foo > /dev/null ; done)

================
CPU 101%
CPU 104%
user 1.264
system 0.942
total 2.108

$ time (for i in 1..1000; do test "$(find b -newer a)" && echo foo > /dev/null ; done)

================
CPU 104%
user 0.693
system 0.526
total 1.164

I looks like find is almost twice as fast, perhaps because it's a single process rather than two stats? I'm not sure how else to compare them; please comment if there are other relevant aspects you can think of.

Here are some other differences, as per Stéphane Chazelas's comments below:

Other differences are: the find one is standard. while the stat one needs the GNU implementation of stat. The stat one won't work for files modified within the same second (while find should work on systems where sub-second granularity for timestamps is supported). Neither find nor stat support arbitrary file names.

You'll find other differences if either of the files cannot be stat()ed.

As far as I know, bash doesn't offer any versions of -ot (and the like) which avoid dereferencing symlinks.

What you can do instead is use GNU stat (which doesn't dereference symbolic links without -L) and compare their mtime epochs numerically:

if (( "$(stat --format=%Z lnkfile)" < "$(stat --format=%Z reffile)" )); then
 # lnkfile is older
fi

With zsh 5.6 or above (for the nanosecond precision), you could do it with builtins only with:

zmodload zsh/stat
if 
 stat -LA lnktime -F '%021s%N' +mtime -- $lnkfile &&
 stat -A reftime -F '%021s%N' +mtime -- $reffile &&
 [[ $lnktime < $reftime ]]
then
 print -r -- $lnkfile is older than $reffile
fi

Which would work regardless of what characters or non-characters the file names contain and compare timestamps down to the nanosecond.

We're comparing the timestamps as strings (number of nanoseconds as a decimal string representation zero-padded to 30 digits) instead of floating points because the typical double precision floating points of a x86_64 PC running GNU/Linux at least don't have enough precision to store numbers like 1548195897.775033155 so you would not be able to tell apart two files modified today within the same 100 nanoseconds.

$ ((1548195897.775033155 < 1548195897.775033255)) && echo yes
$ [[ 1548195897775033155 < 1548195897775033255 ]] && echo yes
yes