The original poster, Larry Simonsen, replied to my programmatic approach
off list, more or less indicating that he wanted an MPE approach. I have
been thinking about this, and wondering if there really is a good way to
use MPE to do this. I would think, assuming files could be years old,
but for a latter month in a previous year, if there is a good way to
parse the years and months. I think it would be a lot of command file
programming, but would be interested to see if someone can prove me
wrong.

As for me, I have considered writing a DAYSAGO COBOL utility that would
take a single numeric argument for the number of days ago, and created a
environment variable for that date, suitable for use in STOREs or
SELEQs. I might want to get fancy, and allow for the three letter
abbreviation for day of week, to return, say, last MONday's date. But if
I could do this in Pure MPE, that would be neat.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Rosenblatt [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 1998 12:28 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: [HP3000-L] days since creation of file
>
> FINFO  function  -6  returns a date in yyyymmdd format.
>
> :setvar creation finfo ("yr1.pub.sys",-6)
> :showvar creation
> CREATION = 19980528
>
> Once you have that you can do whatever calculations you'd like. You
> can
> subtract the variable from the System variables for dates.
> (HPYYY+HPMONTH +HPDATE) etc.