Umm, it's not a 6 month old thread, it's a nearly 6
year old thread.
And while what you say is true, it's not exactly a "Linux" thing, but a filesystem support issue. The metadata fields on *nix filesystems have traditionally recorded three kinds of date;
atime,
ctime, and
mtime.
atime is the last access time, and
ctime is change time, the last time the file metadata was updated.
mtime is the last modified date of the file contents. It's the closest thing to a creation time traditionally available. Essentially, *nix filesystems have treated each modification as a completely new file, a replacement rather than an update.
Recently there's been some work towards adding a proper creation time field to *nix filesystems. ext4, at least, appears to have added this new
crtime field. Most system tools and applications have yet to be updated to handle it, however.
http://flyingunix.blogspot.com/2010/...s-in-ext4.html
Interestingly, according to the above, there seems to also be a
dtime deletion date field, but I have no idea what good that's supposed to be.