accessing a file's creation time

[hejduk]

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
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.

thanks for any suggestions,