Get file creation time with Python on linux

Question

os.stat returns st_mtime and st_ctime attributes, the modification time is st_mtime and st_ctime \"change time\" on POSIX. is there any function that return the creation tim

Answer 1

By lack of a good utility, I've created crtime.

pip install crtime

Then you can use it like:

sudo crtime ./

Would print:

1552938281  /home/pascal/crtime/.gitignore
1552938281  /home/pascal/crtime/README.md
1552938281  /home/pascal/crtime/crtime
1552938281  /home/pascal/crtime/deploy.py
1552938281  /home/pascal/crtime/setup.cfg
1552938281  /home/pascal/crtime/setup.py
1552938961  /home/pascal/crtime/crtime.egg-info
1552939447  /home/pascal/crtime/.git
1552939540  /home/pascal/crtime/build
1552939540  /home/pascal/crtime/dist

Note that for large directories it will be easily 1000x faster than xstat above, as this creates a temporary file and then executes stat calls for all files at once.

In python (don't forget you need to still call it with sudo on linux):

from crtime import get_crtimes, get_crtimes_in_dir
get_crtimes_in_dir("./")