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

Question

I'm using Bash on Debian GNU/Linux 6.0. Is it possible to get the file creation date/time? Not the modification date/time. ls -lh a.txt and stat -c %y a.txt both only give the modification time.

Answer 1

You can find creation time - aka birth time - using stat and also match using find.
We have these files showing last modified time:

$ ls -l --time-style=long-iso | sort -k6
total 692
-rwxrwx---+ 1 XXXX XXXX 249159 2013-05-31 14:47 Getting Started.pdf
-rwxrwx---+ 1 XXXX XXXX 275799 2013-12-30 21:12 TheScienceofGettingRich.pdf
-rwxrwx---+ 1 XXXX XXXX  25600 2015-05-07 18:52 Thumbs.db
-rwxrwx---+ 1 XXXX XXXX 148051 2015-05-07 18:55 AsAManThinketh.pdf

To find files created within a certain time frame using find as below.
Clearly, the filesystem knows about the birth time of a file:

$ find -newerBt '2014-06-13' ! -newerBt '2014-06-13 12:16:10' -ls 
20547673299906851  148 -rwxrwx---   1 XXXX XXXX   148051 May  7 18:55 ./AsAManThinketh.pdf
1407374883582246  244 -rwxrwx---   1 XXXX XXXX   249159 May 31  2013 ./Getting\ Started.pdf

We can confirm this using stat:

$ stat -c "%w %n" * | sort
2014-06-13 12:16:03.873778400 +0100 AsAManThinketh.pdf
2014-06-13 12:16:04.006872500 +0100 Getting Started.pdf
2014-06-13 12:16:29.607075500 +0100 TheScienceofGettingRich.pdf
2015-05-07 18:32:26.938446200 +0100 Thumbs.db

stat man pages explains %w:

%w     time of file birth, human-readable; - if unknown

Answer 2

mikyra's answer is good.The fact just like what he said.

[jason@rh5 test]$ stat test.txt
  File: `test.txt'
  Size: 0               Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular empty file
Device: 802h/2050d      Inode: 588720      Links: 1
Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--)  Uid: (  500/   jason)   Gid: (  500/   jason)
Access: 2013-03-14 01:58:12.000000000 -0700
Modify: 2013-03-14 01:58:12.000000000 -0700
Change: 2013-03-14 01:58:12.000000000 -0700

if you want to verify wich file was created first,you can structure your file name by appending system date when you create a series of files.

Answer 3

Creation date/time is normally not stored. So no, you can't.

Answer 4

Note that if you've got your filesystem mounted with noatime for performance reasons, then the atime will likely show the creation time. Given that noatime results in a massive performance boost (by removing a disk write for every time a file is read), it may be a sensible configuration option that also gives you the results you want.

Answer 5

ls -i menus.xml

94490 menus.xml Here the number 94490 represents inode

Then do a:

df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg-root   4.0G  3.4G  408M  90% /
tmpfs                 1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             124M   27M   92M  23% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg-var    7.9G  1.1G  6.5G  15% /var

To find the mounting point of the root "/" filesystem, because the file menus.xml is on '/' that is '/dev/mapper/vg-root'

debugfs -R 'stat <94490>' /dev/mapper/vg-root

The output may be like the one below:

debugfs -R 'stat <94490>' /dev/mapper/vg-root

debugfs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Inode: 94490   Type: regular    Mode:  0644   Flags: 0x0
Generation: 2826123170    Version: 0x00000000
User:     0   Group:     0   Size: 4441
File ACL: 0    Directory ACL: 0
Links: 1   Blockcount: 16
Fragment:  Address: 0    Number: 0    Size: 0
ctime: 0x5266e438 -- Wed Oct 23 09:46:48 2013
atime: 0x5266e47b -- Wed Oct 23 09:47:55 2013
mtime: 0x5266e438 -- Wed Oct 23 09:46:48 2013
Size of extra inode fields: 4
Extended attributes stored in inode body: 
  selinux = "unconfined_u:object_r:usr_t:s0\000" (31)
BLOCKS:
(0-1):375818-375819
TOTAL: 2

Where you can see the creation time:

ctime: 0x5266e438 -- Wed Oct 23 09:46:48 2013

Answer 6

Cited from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/50177/birth-is-empty-on-ext4/131347#131347 , the following shellscript would work to get creation time:

get_crtime() {
   for target in "${@}"; do
       inode=$(stat -c %i "${target}")
       fs=$(df "${target}"  | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}')
       crtime=$(sudo debugfs -R 'stat <'"${inode}"'>' "${fs}" 2>/dev/null | grep -oP 'crtime.*--\s*\K.*')
       printf "%s\t%s\n" "${target}" "${crtime}"
   done
}