Posted by Gordon Burditt on 02/14/06 04:31

>> >If not is there some other way of getting the created date of a file?
>
>> Very few operating systems keep the created date of a file.
>
>It's not about Operating Systems (Win, Linux, Mac), but File Systems (FAT,
>NTFS, HPFS, UFS, ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS).
>
>Different filesystems keep different metadata about the files, but most of
>them don't keep track of the creation time of the file. Have a look at
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stat_(Unix) for a better understanding of the
>"ctime" field, which will be, in most cases, the closest you'll get to the
>file creation time. Also, have a look at

I disagree. On filesystems where both exist, *mtime*, not ctime
will be the closest to the file creation time. Unless someone has
been manually fiddling with the time stamps (as, for example, a tar
extract will do), ctime >= mtime.

Gordon L. Burditt

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