OSX - How to get the creation & modification time of a file from the command line

Question

While solving some programming puzzle, I wanted to see how long it took me to write a solution to the problem. To do so, I thought it\'d be a good idea to compare the file c

Answer 1

As you already identified, the real culprit was that vim resets all 4 datetime stamps.

But to answer your original question, here is a stat formatting for Mac OSX that will clearly show the 4 datetime stamps (including Creation/Birth and Modify):

stat -f "Access (atime): %Sa%nModify (mtime): %Sm%nChange (ctime): %Sc%nBirth  (Btime): %SB" file.txt

Access (atime): Nov 16 19:44:55 2017
Modify (mtime): Nov 16 19:44:25 2017
Change (ctime): Nov 16 19:44:48 2017
Birth  (Btime): Nov 16 19:44:05 2017