determining date of file creation 1

[langford]

I have been trying to determine the date on which a file was created and was under the impression that if there was no year present (only time of day) then this meant that it was created this year 2002. However I have files with a time of day and a month value of Aug? As we are in Feb how is this possible.

Apologies if this is a bit simplistic,
Thank you.

 

[grega]

The year is shown if the last modification time was more than 6 months ago, so the date/time display would go back to August.

To show the creation date of a file, use ls -lc where -c displays the last modification time of the i-node.

Greg.

 

[SeSe]

This is one from Carlso Almeida (as I recall):

you cannot obtain creation time (ctime) ctime, is NOT the files creation date, creation date is not recorded anywhere in the Unix file system:

"mtime" - time the contents of file was last modified (written to).
"atime" - time the file was last used/accessed (read or executed)
"ctime" - time the inode of the file was last changed (like changing permissions), ctime also gets updated every time mtime is modified, but not when the atime is changed.

None of the Unix commands can do this directly, but the information can be easily obtained using the truss command,
to get all 3 time stamps for a file and to output that information:

# touch teste
# truss -vlstat -tlstat ls -l teste
lstat64("teste", 0xFFBEFC98) = 0
d=0x00000002 i=1886769 m=0100644 l=1 u=0 g=1 sz=0
at = Sep 12 02:44:07 WEST 2001 [ 1000259047 ]
mt = Sep 12 02:44:07 WEST 2001 [ 1000259047 ]
ct = Sep 12 02:44:07 WEST 2001 [ 1000259047 ]
bsz=8192 blks=0 fs=tmpfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Sep 12 02:44 teste

 

[langford]

Hi grega and sese,

Thank you both for the advice, has helped a great deal.

Cheers
Langford

 

[KenCunningham]

Hi. Try a keyword search in this forum for 'file creation'.

 

[kHz]

fsdb will give you the information you want.