How do I find the creation time of a file?


3.1)  How do I find the creation time of a file?

      You can't - it isn't stored anywhere.  Files have a last-modified
      time (shown by "ls -l"), a last-accessed time (shown by "ls -lu")
      and an inode change time (shown by "ls -lc"). The latter is often
      referred to as the "creation time" - even in some man pages -
      but that's wrong; it's also set by such operations as mv, ln,
      chmod, chown and chgrp.

      The man page for "stat(2)" discusses this.

Top Document: Unix - Frequently Asked Questions (3/7) [Frequent posting]
Previous Document: News Headers
Next Document: How do I use "rsh" without having the rsh hang around ... ?

Part1 - Part2 - Part3 - Part4 - Part5 - Part6 - Part7 - Single Page

[ Usenet FAQs | Search | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ]

Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer:
tmatimar@isgtec.com (Ted Timar)

Last Update October 11 2008 @ 00:15 AM