On Aug 19, 2004, at 1:58 PM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
The founding fathers of Unix deliberately left out "creation time" because the concept is ambiguous at best. There's some discussion on it in the classic materials about the early years of Unix.
And I agree with the logic, and the conclusion.
I'd like to read up on that. I'm sure the logic is solid, but I as I said, I fail to figure it out on my own.
Unix *does* track the most recent time anything happens to a file or its metadata via ctime. That's probably close to "creation" as you would probably mean it or need it.
This is what I'm mostly unclear on. What exactly does ctime represent? I think the only descriptions I found said something like "ctime is not the creation date of a file, it is the epoch seconds from the time the script was started."
When is a file's ctime modified? A few quick tests on my Mac OS X lead me to conclude that this is not an accurate measure of when a file was created but I may have missed something obvious.
Kindest Regards,
Bill Stephenson
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