accessing a file's creation time

[Alexander Schreiber]

hejduk <claxtonr at beer.com> wrote:
>i'm running 2.2 on linux 2.4.5 (slak 8.0.) my question is whether
>there is any way to access a file's creation time .  os.stat  provides

Not possible since this information is simply not available.

>access to constants that represent a file's last access time, last
>modification time, and last inode change time, but seemingly no way to
>get it's actual time of creation. i know the os stores this
>information somewhere (a simple "ls -l" demonstrates this), but i just
>can't seem to find a way to access it.

UNIX doesn't usually. And the regular VFS layer simply has no provisions
for dealing with this information, even if a filesystem _did_ store it
somewhere. Have a look a struct stat as described in stat(2).

Regards,
       Alex.
-- 
Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not
have, nor do they deserve, either one.              -- Benjamin Franklin