Windows 7, file properties, date modified, how do you show seconds?

Question

Anyone know a way to immediately show the seconds of a file's date modified property in the GUI? So if you create a file, any file in any directory, right-click and choose Properties, the date modified (if it's recent) will say something like "dd/mm/yyy hh:mm, one minute ago" - reminder this is in Windows 7. Windows XP did it normally. Then they changed something.

If you wait a while, eventually you'll see the seconds, I'm not sure how long a while is, but this is incredibly annoying if you want to troubleshoot something that relies on the seconds of timestamps... is there a setting? registry key I can change perhaps?

I'm literally using Chrome, pasting in the path of the directory to be able to see the seconds quickly (as a workaround) but would be nice to be able to use Win7.

Answer 1

The reason you don't see seconds, is that it was a usability decision to remove them (99% of users don't care about the second a file was last modified).

To accomplish this, the shell team is calling GetTimeFormatEx, using the flag asking for it to remove seconds:

GetTimeFormatEx(..., TIME_NOSECONDS, ...);

which returns the Short time format::

with any seconds (ss)¹ stripped out.

It doesn't solve your problem, but it does explain it.

¹Even though the default en-US locale does not specify ss in the Short time format; TIME_NOSECONDS will remove any ss even if there was. _{Nor would i obey that command even if you were.}

Answer 2

According to Microsoft Answers:

Unfortunately we don’t know why this was removed; it’s on the developers’ side of things and out of our realm of “in-the-know”.

As you specified Chrome (and Firefox) will display seconds.

I just loaded XP pro in vmware, and saw the default for XP is sans seconds. Then I checked GNU ls on both Linux and Cygwin, no seconds displayed (by default). Granted you can do ls -l --time-style=full-iso to get the granularity you need. I guess I never really thought of needing that level of detail.

Answer 3

fileTweak is a program that adds a tab in Explorer properties. It is mainly used to change the date/time, but it will display seconds. Unfortunately it isn't free.

That said, I thought there was a free add-in that basically did the same thing.