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Is there a command in linux to check all timestamps of a file?

I'm trying to see the Last modified, created, and touched dates on the file.

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Just to point out, Linux files don't have birth dates. Thus, it's not possible to determine the date a file was created. – FatalError Feb 7 '12 at 15:12
noticed that =(. Thanks for pointing it out to me. – Mechaflash Feb 7 '12 at 15:25
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@FatalError: Various filesystems already support birth/creation timestamps; the real trouble is in accessing such extra information. (One can't just extend struct stat without breaking things, unfortunately...) You can try out debugfs -R "stat <1234>" /dev/sdXY for ext4, replacing 1234 with an ino. – grawity Feb 7 '12 at 17:03
@grawity: Neat! I always wondered why no fs had it... but I guess they do, but like you said, can't just go breaking the ABI for existing binaries. Thanks for the tip :). – FatalError Feb 7 '12 at 17:45

1 Answer

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The command is basically called stat.

charon:Desktop werner$ stat test
234881026 41570368 -rw-r--r-- 1 werner staff 0 0 "Feb  7 16:03:06 2012" "Feb  7 16:03:06 2012" "Feb  7 16:03:06 2012" "Feb  7 16:03:06 2012" 4096 0 0 test

If you want to adjust the format, refer to the manpages, since the output is OS-specific and varies under Linux/Unix.

Generally, you can get the times through a normal directory listing as well:

  • ls -l outputs last time the file content was modified, the mtime
  • ls -lc outputs last time of file status modification, the ctime (What's the difference?)
  • ls -lu outputs last access time (although the usefulness of this concept is subject to discussion)

And of course, ctime does not record when a file was "created". This is not possible in Unix (as @FatalError already stated in the comment above).

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+1 Thank you so much =D. – Mechaflash Feb 7 '12 at 15:10

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