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Anyone know a way to immediately show the seconds of a file's date modified property in the GUI? So if you create a file, any file in any directory, right-click and choose Properties, the date modified (if it's recent) will say something like "dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm, one minute ago" - reminder this is in Windows 7. Windows XP did it normally. Then they changed something.

If you wait a while, eventually you'll see the seconds, I'm not sure how long a while is, but this is incredibly annoying if you want to troubleshoot something that relies on the seconds of timestamps... is there a setting? registry key I can change perhaps?

I'm literally using Chrome, pasting in the path of the directory to be able to see the seconds quickly (as a workaround) but would be nice to be able to use Win7.

Franck Dernoncourt
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Jordan W.
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8 Answers8

65

I found a solution at http://www.nicholasoverstreet.com/2010/03/windows-7-annoyance-file-properties/.

Go to 'Control Panel' → 'Region and Language' → 'Additional Settings' → Date tab.

Remove the string dddd (e.g. change it to ddd) click 'Apply' and it should work fine.

Explanation:

'Rightclick file properties' uses the value "Long Date" + empty_space + "Long Time". Long date is 'dddd, d MMMM yyyy' by default, and 'Long Time' is h:mm:ss tt. However, it looks like as long as you have the string dddd in 'Long Date', it may sometimes ignore your 'Long Time' settings, overriding it with "x minutes ago".

Community
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Andrew
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I've been looking at the same problem and as far as I can tell, no there isn't a way.

However, I've been using a workaround that has satisified what I needed it for so hopefully it will help you. The following command, when run from a command line in the directory in question, will print out the file names and the modified date down to seconds:

forfiles /c "cmd /c echo @file @ftime"

I hope that might be of some use to people.

dlanod
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You can view the file creation/modification time quickly in PowerShell:

PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file = C:\windows\notepad.exe
PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file = Get-Item C:\windows\notepad.exe
PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file.CreationTime

Monday, July 13, 2009 6:56:36 PM


PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file.LastAccessTime

Monday, July 13, 2009 6:56:36 PM


PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file.LastWriteTime

Monday, July 13, 2009 8:39:25 PM

Inspired by a TechNet blog post using PowerShell for some other crazy tricks.

mskfisher
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It's important to note that Windows does show seconds. The hiding of seconds only happens in the main Explorer window:

enter image description here

But Andrew wasn't asking about the main Explorer window, he was asking about the the Right-click -> Properties dialog, which does show seconds:

enter image description here

If it works on Properties, why not in the main window?

The reason you don't see seconds, is that it was a usability decision to remove them (99% of users don't care about the second a file was last modified).

To accomplish this, the shell team is calling GetTimeFormatEx, using the flag asking for it to remove seconds:

GetTimeFormatEx(..., TIME_NOSECONDS, ...);

which returns the Short time format::

alt text

with any seconds (ss)1 stripped out.

1Even though the default en-US locale does not specify ss in the Short time format; TIME_NOSECONDS will remove any ss even if there was. Nor would i obey that command even if you were.

Edit: If you want to see the time a file was modified (down to the second), then use the Windows GUI. It shows you the time a file was modified (down to the second):

enter image description here

If you don't want to use the Windows GUI to see the time a file was modified (down to the second), then don't use it.

Edit 3/26/2015: The Windows UI will always show the modified time down to the second - even if the file has been modified very recently:

enter image description here

Edit 1/28/2016: Included Windows 10 screenshot to show that Windows 10, like Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, do show seconds.

Ian Boyd
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According to Microsoft Answers: (Archived, Jan. 2010)

Unfortunately we don’t know why this was removed; it’s on the developers’ side of things and out of our realm of “in-the-know”.

As you specified Chrome (and Firefox) will display seconds.

I just loaded XP pro in vmware, and saw the default for XP is sans seconds. Then I checked GNU ls on both Linux and Cygwin, no seconds displayed (by default). Granted you can do ls -l --time-style=full-iso to get the granularity you need. I guess I never really thought of needing that level of detail.

jrh
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Darren Hall
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If you want a free Windows Explorer add-on to display created, modified, access times with seconds, try stexbar. It adds a tab to a file's properties that allows changing the created, modified, access times and it displays the current times with seconds.

See here for more information.

Indrek
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jxf011
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fileTweak is a program that adds a tab in Explorer properties. It is mainly used to change the date/time, but it will display seconds. Unfortunately it isn't free.

That said, I thought there was a free add-in that basically did the same thing.

Scott McClenning
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You can change the default "Short time format" by going to:

Region & Language -> Additional Settings -> Time Tab -> Short time

Simply set this value to: h:mm:ss tt and you'll have seconds shown on file properties now.

Paul
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