Get age of a file/dir

[Simon Forman]

url81-1 wrote:
> Actually this has  nothing to do with datetime.datetime -- he's asking
> how to find the created time of the directory.
>
> Python has a builtin module called "stat" (afer sys/stat.h) which
> includes ST_ATIME, ST_MTIME, ST_CTIME members which are times accessed,
> modified, and created, respectively.
>
> Best,
> Earle Ady
>
> Jim wrote:
> > Carl J. Van Arsdall wrote:
> > > I've been looking around the OS module and I haven't found anything
> > > useful yet.  Does anyone know how to get the age of a file or directory
> > > in days?  I'm using unix and don't seem to find anything that will help
> > > me.  The only function that comes close so far is
> > >
> > > os.path.getctime(path)
> > >
> > >
> > > However this only gets creation time on Windows, on Unix it gets the the
> > > time of the last change.  Any ideas?
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> > >
> > > -carl
> > >
> > > --
> > >
> > > Carl J. Van Arsdall
> > > cvanarsdall at mvista.com
> > > Build and Release
> > > MontaVista Software
> >
> > Hi,
> > You should check out the datetime module.  And convert dates to an
> > ordinal number.
> >      today = datetime.date.today().toordinal()
> >      age = today - datetime.date(year, month, day).toordinal()
> > Jim

No, the st_ctime member isn't the creation time on *nix, from the os
module docs: "st_ctime (platform dependent; time of most recent
metadata change on Unix, or the time of creation on Windows)"

I hope somebody does post a solution to this, as I'd like to know how
to get the creation time of a file on linux, et. al.

It may be impossible:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part3/section-1.html

Peace,
~Simon