[Sunhelp] exact creation time of files

[Doug McLaren]

On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 12:17:05PM -0400, Wolfgang Engelien wrote:

| is there a way to determin the creation time of a file
| in the second range in Solaris/Irix?

Each file has a ctime, mtime and atime.

mtime = time of last modification of the file
atime = time of last access
ctime = time that the inode of the file was last altered.

Normally the ctime is called the `creation time' and if it really were
so, then this would be what you wanted.  But if you ever use `touch'
on a file or use the utime() call, you reset the ctime to the current
system time so you can't rely on it to be the `creation time'.

That being said, you can view the ctime of a file on any Un*x system
with a `ls -lc { file name }'.  For more details, `man ls'.

-- 
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzy.com