How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time

[senthil_kumar_1]

Hi All,

How to see a files create time, access time and modification time?

What does access time and modification time mean?

[Dennis Handly]

>How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time?

Unix and Linux don't track creation time.

You can see the latter two with "ls -lu" and "ls -l".

>What does access time and modification time mean?

Modification means what you expect, the file was modified.

Access means the file was ether read or written.

[H.Becker · Accepted solution]

Have a look at  the fstat man page. There are three time fields st_atime, st_mtime and  st_ctime: time of last access, last modification and last status change. None of these holds the creation time/date.

Further the man page explains when which field is updated. With ls you can see these times. On Linux it just looks like this:

$ rm -f aFile

$ touch aFile

$ ls -lu --full aFile # shows atime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 0 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ ls -l  --full aFile # shows mtime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 0 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ ls -lc --full aFile # shows ctime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 0 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ echo >>aFile hello

$ ls -lu --full aFile # shows atime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ ls -l  --full aFile # shows mtime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:43:14.989031242 +0100 aFile

$ ls -lc --full aFile # shows ctime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:43:14.989031242 +0100 aFile

$ chmod o+w aFile 

$ ls -lu --full aFile # shows atime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ ls -l  --full aFile # shows mtime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:43:14.989031242 +0100 aFile

$ ls -lc --full aFile # shows ctime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:44:22.435327799 +0100 aFile

$ cat aFile 

hello

$ ls -lu --full aFile # shows atime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:45:18.901684610 +0100 aFile

$ ls -l  --full aFile # shows mtime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:43:14.989031242 +0100 aFile

$ ls -lc --full aFile # shows ctime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:44:22.435327799 +0100 aFile

$

As you can see, writing to the file with echo didn't change the access time.

[abbasmohammed]

Hi All,

We can see using "stat" command.

stat filename

it will show the requested things

[Dennis Handly]

>it will show the requested things

Except for creation time.

[Ajin_1]

# stat /etc/passwd
  File: `/etc/passwd'
  Size: 7623            Blocks: 16         IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: fd00h/64768d    Inode: 314330      Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2014-11-25 12:55:42.000000000 +0300
Modify: 2014-10-24 07:27:51.000000000 +0300
Change: 2014-10-24 07:27:51.000000000 +0300