How to Get File Creation Date/Time in Bash/Debian

How to get file creation date/time in Bash/Debian?

Unfortunately your quest won't be possible in general, as there are only 3 distinct time values stored for each of your files as defined by the POSIX standard (see Base Definitions section 4.8 File Times Update)

Each file has three distinct associated timestamps: the time of last
data access, the time of last data modification, and the time the file
status last changed. These values are returned in the file
characteristics structure struct stat, as described in <sys/stat.h>.

EDIT: As mentioned in the comments below, depending on the filesystem used metadata may contain file creation date. Note however storage of information like that is non standard. Depending on it may lead to portability problems moving to another filesystem, in case the one actually used somehow stores it anyways.

Print a file's last modified date in Bash

You can use the
stat
command

stat -c %y "$entry"

More info

%y   time of last modification, human-readable

How to get file creation date in Linux?

fstat works on file descriptors, not FILE structures. The simplest version:

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <stdio.h>

#ifdef HAVE_ST_BIRTHTIME
#define birthtime(x) x.st_birthtime
#else
#define birthtime(x) x.st_ctime
#endif

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        struct stat st;
        size_t i;

        for( i=1; i<argc; i++ )
        {
                if( stat(argv[i], &st) != 0 )
                        perror(argv[i]);
                printf("%i\n", birthtime(st));
        }

        return 0;
}

You will need to figure out if your system has st_birthtime in its stat structure by inspecting sys/stat.h or using some kind of autoconf construct.

Date and time of a file in Unix in a desired format

Unix doesn't have a file creation time. It has these:

• last modified time (content was modified)
• last inode or files status change time (attributes like permissions, number of links etc., were changed)
• last access time (content was read)

ls is the best option if you are not feeding the output to a program. man ls is your friend.

ls -lu => show last access time
ls -lc => show last status change time
ls -l  => show last modified time (default)

In general, it is not recommended that we feed the output of ls into a program because of portability concerns. On macOS and Linux systems, we have a stat command to extract file status information.

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Print a file's last modified date in Bash

How to get the modified date and year of file in Unix?

How to get file creation time in Unix with Perl

how do I check in bash whether a file was created more than x time ago?

Only for modification time

if test `find "text.txt" -mmin +120`
then
    echo old enough
fi

You can use -cmin for change or -amin for access time. As others pointed I don’t think you can track creation time.

How to use 'find' to search for files created on a specific date?

As pointed out by Max, you can't, but checking files modified or accessed is not all that hard. I wrote a tutorial about this, as late as today. The essence of which is to use -newerXY and ! -newerXY:

Example: To find all files modified on the 7th of June, 2007:

$ find . -type f -newermt 2007-06-07 ! -newermt 2007-06-08

To find all files accessed on the 29th of september, 2008:

$ find . -type f -newerat 2008-09-29 ! -newerat 2008-09-30

Or, files which had their permission changed on the same day:

$ find . -type f -newerct 2008-09-29 ! -newerct 2008-09-30

If you don't change permissions on the file, 'c' would normally correspond to the creation date, though.

Write current date/time to a file using shell script

Use date >> //home/user/Desktop/Scripts/Date Logs/datelog.txt.

Like i tried in my system :-

date > /tmp/date.txt.
And file contains Wed Apr 5 09:27:37 IST 2017.

[Edit] There are difference between >>(appending to the file) and >(Create the new file)

Edit:- As suggested by chepner, you can directly redirect the o/p of date command to file using date >> /tmp/date.txt.

How to get true file creation date in R, on Unix systems?

Following other's pointers, this should work quite reasonably.
Unfortunately it needs root privileges (dued to debugfs) and it's not very efficient yet (especially a bit quick'n dirty on regular expressions, but it's 01:00 o clock in the morning here :) ).

BTW, we set up the pager to be cat (making debugfs to print on standard output), find in which device the file is stored in order to use debugfs properly and finally get the stats and elaborate it a bit.

In general, in UNIX, once you have a bash-command to read its output in R you have to use pipe in read mode(that is default) and readLines.

Test done in a Debian Gnu Linux.

np350v5c:/home/l# R
> my.file <- "/etc/network/interfaces"
> 
> setup_pager <- function() {system("export PAGER=cat")}
> 
> where_is <- function(file) {
      con <- pipe(sprintf("df %s", file))
      res <- strsplit(readLines(con)[2], " ")[[1]][1]
      close(con)
      res
  }
> 
> where_is(my.file) # could be /dev/sda1 as well, depending on /etc/fstab
[1] "/dev/disk/by-uuid/9ce40c2b-60d8-40b1-890f-1e5da4199c88"
> 
> my.command <- sprintf("debugfs -R 'stat %s' %s",
                        my.file,
                        where_is(my.file))
> 
> ## root privileges especially here ..                                           
> setup_pager()
> con <- pipe(my.command)
> debugfs <- readLines(con)
debugfs 1.42.9 (4-Feb-2014)
> close(con)
> 
> my.date <- gsub("^crtime:.+-- ", "", grep("^crtime", debugfs, value = TRUE))
> my.date
[1] "Tue Feb 19 00:07:21 2013"
> strptime(tolower(substr(my.date, 5, nchar(my.date))),
           format = "%b %d %H:%M:%S %Y")
[1] "2013-02-19 00:07:21 CET"

HTH, Luca

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