[Pythonmac-SIG] file creation dates

[Eric Nieuwland]

Russell,

Welcome to the wonderful world of UNIX!
Ctime is the last time there was a change to the 'inode'. Inodes are 
what a UNIX file system is made of: they are the administrative units 
that represent files/directories/... Each time an attribute like atime, 
mtime, owner, or group is explicitly changed, ctime changes. Thus, if 
you write to a file only mtime changes but if you 'touch' a file (i.e. 
manually change mtime) then ctime changes, too.

--eric

On Friday, June 6, 2003, at 08:38 PM, Russell E Owen wrote:

> I've just stumbled across something new to me. In MacPython 2.2.2, the 
> st_ctime returned by os.stat was the file creation date. Somehow I had 
> the impression that was normal. However, in Mac Python 2.3b1 and in 
> unix-on-Mac python 2.2.2 the st_ctime is something else (perhaps the 
> "time of last status change", whatever that is, as documented in 
> Python in a Nutshell).
>
> It is interesting that the st_ctime can be different than the st_atime 
> and st_mtime, even under the unix Python 2.2.2 -- I had no idea the 
> HFS+ had so many file date entries. Yikes! (And how could unix be 
> missing such an important thing as file creation date? Weird.)
>
> Anyway, I've been using file creation date and am wondering what to do.
>
> Is there a simple standard way to get the file creation date in Mac 
> Python 2.3b1, preferably one that also works in MacPython 2.2.2?
>
> -- Russell
>
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