Hello Haskellers. I'm having a bit of trouble solving the challenge in chapter 9 of the book Real World Haskell [1]. I understand the portable code and have no difficulty with it. More specifically, I want to know how to get a file's last modified date. Perhaps in understanding this bit I may also extrapolate to similar parts of System.Win32 more easily. A simple example using portable code, and also formats the date: getFileModifiedDate :: FilePath -> IO String getFileModifiedDate f = do m <- getModificationTime f c <- toCalendarTime m return $ formatCalendarTime undefined "%Y-%m-%d %T" c However, the exercise is to "port the code from this chapter to your platform's native API", which in my case is System.Win32. Using the simple example, I know that I can use getFileTime from System.Win32 [2]: getFileTime :: HANDLE -> IO (FILETIME, FILETIME, FILETIME) I suppose that means getFileTime takes a file handle (with type HANDLE) and returns an IO type with CreationTime LastAccessTime LastWriteTime [3]. The thing is I don't know how to get a HANDLE type. I understand I can get a file handle by opening it. I've been trying the following: openFile :: FilePath -> IOMode -> IO Handle fh <- openFile "myfile.hs" ReadMode Right now I cannot use getFileTime on it because this has type Handle: Couldn't match expected type `HANDLE' with actual type `Handle' In the first argument of `getFileTime', namely `fh' In a stmt of an interactive GHCi command: nf <- getFileTime fh I think I got lost at inspecting the type HANDLE = Ptr () If anyone could make a useful example I would appreciate it very much. Perhaps it's just me going around in circles. Regards, P. M. Pocinho -- [1] http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/io-case-study-a-library-for-searching-... [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Win32/2.2.1.0/doc/html/System-Wi... [3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724320%28v=VS.85%2...