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

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