Setting creation or change timestamps

Question

Using utimes, futimes, futimens, etc., it is possible to set the access and modification timestamps on a file.

Modification ti

Answer 1

According to http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2010-08/msg00010.html ctime cannot be faked (at least it's not intended to be fakeable):

POSIX says that atime and mtime are user-settable to arbitrary times via the utimensat() family of syscalls, but that ctime must unfakeably track the current time of any action that changes a file's metadata or contents.

If you just need to change a file's ctime for some testing/debugging, bindfs might be helpful. It's a FUSE filesystem which mounts one directory into another place, and can do some transformation on the file attributes. With option --ctime-from-mtime the ctime of each file is the same as its mtime, which you can set with touch -t.