Greetings:

Does Slackware, or Linux in general, maintain a "file created"
timestamp like Windows? Cuz I'm looking at file properties in Konqueror
and notices only two entries for time stamp ("last modified" and "last
accessed")

FYI, I'm using ReiserFS.

Regards,

Shuo Xiang

On 2005-04-05, sxiang@student.math.uwaterloo.ca
<sxiang@student.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> Greetings:
>
> Does Slackware, or Linux in general, maintain a "file created"
> timestamp like Windows? Cuz I'm looking at file properties in Konqueror
> and notices only two entries for time stamp ("last modified" and "last
> accessed")
>
> FYI, I'm using ReiserFS.
>
> Regards,
>
> Shuo Xiang
>

go to the commandline and type

man stat

All info about files can be found here.

ken

sxiang@student.math.uwaterloo.ca wrote :

> Does Slackware, or Linux in general, maintain a "file created"
> timestamp like Windows?

No. In Linux a file has three timestamps. One shows the last access
the other shows last modification and the third shows when the
properties of the file was changed.
--
Thomas O.

This area is designed to become quite warm during normal operation.

Why doesn't Linux have the "file created" timestamp???

sxiang@student.math.uwaterloo.ca wrote:
> Why doesn't Linux have the "file created" timestamp???

Because Linux is an implementation of UNIX and Unix never had that.
As noted before, it DOES have:
last accessed (read,used)
last modified (file contents)
last changed (attributes etc)
timestamp. Unlike Windows, the Unix timestamp is accurate UP to the
second, althoung "ls -l" normally doesn't show them (FAT date/time
stamps only store the EVEN seconds, so the stamp is always a multiple
of 2 seconds, don't know for certain about NTFS).
--
************************************************** ******************
** Eef Hartman, Delft University of Technology, dept. EWI/TW **
** e-mail: E.J.M.Hartman@math.tudelft.nl, fax: +31-15-278 7295 **
** snail-mail: P.O. Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands **
************************************************** ******************

sxiang@student.math.uwaterloo.ca wrote:
> Why doesn't Linux have the "file created" timestamp???
>

What would be the use anyway ?
If the file has been changed, then creation time is not relevant.
(Unix style by the way)

gregg wrote:
> sxiang@student.math.uwaterloo.ca wrote:
> > Why doesn't Linux have the "file created" timestamp???
> >
>
> What would be the use anyway ?
> If the file has been changed, then creation time is not relevant.
> (Unix style by the way)

Thanks for the response. In my case there's actually a good reason why
I want the file creation time:

I'm going to write the GRE essay on computers very soon, and is timing
myself to see how fast I can do computer compositions. So by
subtracting the time last modified from the time of file creation I can
figure out how much time I spent composing any one essay.

I know I can also look at the clock, but somehow the mental pressure is
more if I know a clock is ticking away, so I generally won't do well
under those circumstances. Later I found this "discrete" way of having
the computer keep the time for me and I absolutely loved it!!!

Shuo Xiang

sxiang@student.math.uwaterloo.ca wrote:

> I'm going to write the GRE essay on computers very soon, and is timing
> myself to see how fast I can do computer compositions. So by
> subtracting the time last modified from the time of file creation I can
> figure out how much time I spent composing any one essay.

You may be interested with a revision control solution, a simple one
like RCS would do the trick: you could then issue a shell-script to
compare times between each opening.

Or maybe using your editor with "time" ?
(not too pretty a solution, I'll admit to that one).

++