And thus spake Andrew Vardy, on Sat, Apr 25, 1998 at 05:12:12PM -0230:
I wonder about the Unix method of date stamping.
It gives a date of last access when you do ls -al
But, I wonder if UNIX keeps a creation date stamp. Date and time stamp of
file's creation. Thought it might be helpful if it did.
The only times you can access are:
st_atime Time when file data was last accessed. This can
also be set explicitly by utimes(2). st_atime
is not updated for directories searched during
pathname resolution.
st_mtime Time when file data was last modified. This can
also be set explicitly by utimes(2). It is not
set by changes of owner, group, link count, or
mode.
st_ctime Time when file status was last changed. It is
set both both by writing and changing the file
status information, such as changes of owner,
group, link count, or mode.
Some filesystems may choose to save creation times, but it's implementation
defined, and there's no portable way of finding them.
--
Elie Rosenblum <erosenbl at nyx.net>That is not dead which can eternal lie,
<fnord at cosanostra.net> And with strange aeons even death may die.
Developer / Mercenary / System Administrator - _The Necromicon_