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knight63 - Mar 6, 2007 - 6:03 pm

I need to determine which applications have been run on a mac running 10.2. I need to get a date and time as to when the program MSN messenger was accessed. I do not have Apple Remote Desktop on this machine and can't seem to find anything in the cache files to help.

Thanks,

Jeni

- Mar 7, 2007 - 8:29 am

Understanding why, would help to know what it is exactly you are looking to do. There are many ways of doing this sort of thing and some are better then others depending on the goal.

For example, perhaps you are trying to determine if your kids used the MSN Messenger while you were not home, etc. If this is the case, a much better solution would be to either upgrade Mac OS X to Tiger 10.4 or wait until Leopard 10.5 ships this summer (June is expected date). Both include Parental controls that greatly enhance your ability to restrict computer usage. Also many Internet routers have the ability to filter a single computers access based on date and time. This means you can shut off the Internet for a period of time during the day or only allow it during a particular time of day.

Tiger Parental Controls -- see the video on this page:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/family/

Leopard Sneak Peek:
Because You Said So, More flexible parental controls in Leopard mean you can place restrictions on use of the Internet. You can, say, specify a time of day and duration for your child to play World of Warcraft. And with new remote setup, you can set parental controls from anywhere.

So if it works for World of Warcraft it will work for any application such as MSN Messenger.

Easy way to lookup a Last Accessed date:
I don't know if 10.2 can do this, but the easy way is to highlight the MSN Messenger and press Apple + I and it should have a Last Opened line under More Info. However, this particular bit of info may not exist in 10.2; I have 10.4.8.

Harder way:
Another way to determine the last accessed time of a file or application is to open the Unix Terminal under /Applications/Utilities and type the following:

cd /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2004/
stat -x MSN\ Messenger.app/

You will see an Access: Date/Time entry, this is the last accessed date.

For more information on the 'stat' command type:

man stat

The paths above assume that MSN Messenger was installed with Microsoft Office 2004, you may have to change the path to be the location of the MSN Messenger application.

knight63 - Mar 7, 2007 - 7:27 pm

Thanks for the info - I actually am trying to determine if a teacher in a school lab allowed students to access the MSN message program. I am at the district level and the principal wants this information without the teacher's knowledge. I will first try to do Get Info, but If I use the option for Unix Terminal, will it change the Time or Date stamp in any way? Can I use this command (with changes) for other applications information also? I will try the suggestions. Thanks again - this is a great forum for answers!