File Times (mtime, ctime, atime)

Posted on Feb 21, 2009

Unlike Windiws, you can not determine when a file was created. Instead, you can only determine three things:

atime – the time in which a file was accessed. This includes viewing the contents of the file or executinng a shell script.
```
    cat example\_file
    
```
ctime – the time in which a file’s inode (owner, group, and permissions) and when the file’s contents were last changed. To view the files ctime with the ls command use the -lc flags.
```
    chown root:root example\_file
    
```
mtime – is the time in which a files conntents have been modified. This differs from the ctime as it will not reflect when the permissions were modified.
```
    echo "Hello!" >> example\_file
    
```