Bill Atkins wrote:

Almost - "liftM modificationTime" has type Status -> IO EpochTime. Like other IO functions (getLine, putStrLn), it returns an IO action but accepts a pure value (the modification time)

Also, I like this style:

import Control.Applicative ((<$>))

blah = do

times <- mapM (PF.modificationTime <$> PF.getFileStatus) filenames

...

The <$> operator evaluates to fmap so it's a cleaner way to apply a pure function to an IO value.

That won't type-check (unless I've missed some crafty trick with the types?!); you have two functions you want to compose, but the <$> operator (i.e. fmap) applies a function on the left to a functor-value on the right. You would instead need:

times <- mapM ((PF.modificationTime <$>) . PF.getFileStatus) filenames

At which point I prefer Ivan's liftM version rather than the above section (or worse: using (<$>) prefix). The original request is a relatively common thing to want to do, so I was slightly surprised that hoogling for:

(b -> c) -> (a -> f b) -> a -> f c

didn't turn up any relevant results. This function is a lot like (<=<) but with a pure rather than side-effecting function on the left-hand side.

Thanks,

Neil.