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.

Answer 1

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