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

If you really want to achieve that you can use a file watcher like inotifywait.

You watch a directory and you save information about file creations in separate file outside that directory.

while true; do
  change=$(inotifywait -e close_write,moved_to,create .)
  change=${change#./ * }
  if [ "$change" = ".*" ]; then ./scriptToStoreInfoAboutFile; fi
done

As no creation time is stored, you can build your own system based on inotify.