what is the difference betwenn atime, ctime and mtime in find command

[senthil_kumar_1]

Hi All,

Then how to find the original creation time of the file or directory.

[Pete Randall]

As JRF said, there is no such thing as creation time in Unix, therefore you can not find the creation time of a directory (unless it has never been modified).


Pete

[Bob E Campbell]

For many files m(odification) time will be the creation time. For directories look for the oldest modification time of contents (ls -lrt). In all cases, remember that the touch(1) command can set any time somebody wants. Use "man touch" for info.

If there are specific system files that interest you, there are many different logs that can tell you much about when events happened. For example, swlist(1m) can be used to list the times that software was installed:

# swlist -l product -a install_date
# Initializing...
# Contacting target "swa"...
#
# Target: swa:/
#

ACXX 200710041617.26
Accounting 200710010316.26
AppDiscMN 200710010316.31
Availability 200710010316.36
BLKONLY-MS 200710010713.39
BOOT-KBD 200710010713.39
BOOT-MOUSE 200710010713.39
Bastille 200710010316.37
C-ANSI-C 200710041617.26

Note that the modification times of the actual files may well be the times they were compiled back in the lab.

[Kranti Mahmud]

Hi Senthil,

how to find the original creation time of the file or directory.

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.

Rgds-Kranti

[isunrise_1]

it's a easy question!
man find