How to get file creation & modification date/times in Python?

Question

I have a script that needs to do some stuff based on file creation & modification dates but has to run on Linux & Windows.

Answer 1

os.stat returns a named tuple with st_mtime and st_ctime attributes. The modification time is st_mtime on both platforms; unfortunately, on Windows, ctime means "creation time", whereas on POSIX it means "change time". I'm not aware of any way to get the creation time on POSIX platforms.