Site management and control

How the sychronize offline and online pages

[Orange_XL]

I want to write a basic PERL-script that at given intervals synchronizes offline pages with online pages. The problem; Hoe do I figure which version (offline or online) is the latest and most recent?

Things like last modification time of files etc. are unreliable. So what is left? Meta-tags with the version and latest revision-time in them (this would require that all files are downloaded first :-( ), external files with version information in them (these could get lost, damaged and I would need to hide them from ordinary visitors/bots).
I'm lost :-(

Anyone got experience in this area?

[DaveAtIFG]

Things like last modification time of files etc. are unreliable.

If your offline/online systems have their dates and times correctly set, last modified times are pretty reliable. Dreamweaver includes a Synchronize Files feature that seems to be based on last modified times.