<p>Currently I monitoring a particular file with a simple shell one-liner:</p>

<pre><code>filesize=$(ls -lah somefile |  awk '{print $5}')
</code></pre>

<p>I'm aware that Perl has some nice modules to deal with Excel files so the idea is to, let's say, run that check daily, perhaps with cron, and write the result on a spreadsheet for further statistical use.</p>

You can use
the
```
-s
```
operator
to obtain the size of a file and the
Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
and
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel
modules to produce an updated spreadsheet with the information.
Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::SaveParser
lets you easily combine the two, in case you want to update an existing file with new information. If you are on Windows, you may want to automate Excel itself instead, probably with the aid of
Win32::OLE
.