Few more details on File handle

In my previous post I talked about file object that you get on FileOpen() which is nothing but handle to the native file. Did you ever try to dump this object? This file object provides lot of valuable information. If I run this code below

<cfset myfile = FileOpen("C:\cfunited_notes.txt")>
<cfdump var="#myfile#">
<cfloop condition="Not FileIsEOF(myfile)">
    <cfset line = FileReadLine(myfile)>
    <cfoutput>#line#</cfoutput><br>
</cfloop>
<cfset FileClose(myfile)>

this is what gets dumped.

As you can see, it gives you information like lastmodified time, mode in which the file was opened, name, path, size in bytes and status of this file object whether this is still open or closed.

This object acts very much like a struct. So you can access these data from the file object using the simple dot notation. For example, to find out the last modified time, you can use fileObj.lastmodified

That gives another useful tool in your hand. While you are writing a file incrementally, you can easily find out the size of the file written so far using fileObj.size. This will be very helpful if you want to build a logging application where log files are rotated. While you are logging the data, as soon as the file size becomes more than your certain limit, you can close the file object and start writing to a new log file.