We have instances having RHEL 5.10 in our setup. The file system type shown using

df –T

says that file system type is ext3. The ls –ltr command seems to show the modification time but not created date.

I hope my question is clear on how to find the created date of a file in Red Hat Linux.

Requesting a reply to my query.

Regards

"stat <filename>" shows you all the relevant timestamps tracked with the file.

Thanks for your reply. I did few operations on a sample file,

$ cat > 2 (I created a sample file)
hi
$ stat 2
File: `2'
Size: 3 Blocks: 16 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: fd00h/64768d Inode: 98313 Links: 1
Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--) Uid: ( 502/crestelonm) Gid: ( 504/crestelonm)
Access: 2014-09-11 16:06:51.000000000 +0530
Modify: 2014-09-11 16:06:54.000000000 +0530
Change: 2014-09-11 16:06:54.000000000 +0530

$ vim 2 (I edited the file,2)
$ cat 2
hi hello
$ stat 2
File: `2'
Size: 9 Blocks: 16 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: fd00h/64768d Inode: 98313 Links: 1
Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--) Uid: ( 502/crestelonm) Gid: ( 504/crestelonm)
Access: 2014-09-11 16:07:51.000000000 +0530
Modify: 2014-09-11 16:08:00.000000000 +0530
Change: 2014-09-11 16:08:00.000000000 +0530

As you can see above that the initial time while creating the file which is 16:06:51.000000000 is not shown after I edited the file.

Requesting a reply so that there is clarity on how to get created date of a file.

Regards

Hi,

What you are seeing is everything that is tradiotionally tracked for an inode (access, file modification & inode change). Unfortunately creation time is not tracked on ext3 filesystems.

In modern Linux filesystems, such as ext4, Btrfs and JFS there is a new "birth" time attribute in the inode - the moment when it was created on the file system. They use different names for the attribute, though - t is also known as "crtime", "otime" or "btime".

The POSIX stat() function hasn't been updated to return this information, so tools that display inode information are still catching up, and many don't show this info even on ext4.One tool that does show this info is debugfs:

Here you can find a discussion regarding the stat command and the specific output you're seeing.

OS X's HFS and Microsoft's NTFS also both track the birth time, and I'm told the OS X and Cygwin versions of stat() return this information.

Additional information is availble in this discussion.

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