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Created Date (file) in MP Linux: how and why?

Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 9:09 am
by Silversleeves
I find it curious that some files I've viewed in the MP Browser, Info pane, that happened to have been copied from my Windows machine, still have "Date Created" in among their info details. I can understand that it would be helpful for folks running the Windows and Mac OS X builds of MP to have this information, but in and with Linux, I'm used to seeing just "Date Modified" and being satisfied with that.

Which raises another question. Nowhere else in my Linux distro, which because I detest Unity is still Ubuntu 11.04 Classic, does it show "Date Created" in any GUI or command-line application. I was, perhaps naively, under the impression that such information was removed in the "Ext3," "Ext4" and so on, file systems. So where are these dates coming from? And if just about every Linux kernel and build I can think of ignores them anyway (note here I write "just about every," not "every"), why bother with them in the first place?

BZT

Re: Created Date (file) in MP Linux: how and why?

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2014 4:32 am
by CameronD
As far as I know all Linux filesystems (and OS-X?) should support the 3 dates - m-time, c-time and a-time. m for modified and (confusingly) c is for change. But it means inode contents change, not file contents.
Windows filesystems actually call the c-time "create time", but I am not sure what defines "create", because I notice that a file can be created many years after it was last modified.

updating "access time" can be turned off for efficiency, and some people (not me) like to have software subvert the meaning of m-time, so you can't really trust any of the times across OS.