[LUGSB] finding the 'file creation date'

Sun Nov 23 23:36:11 EST 2003

All,

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Erez Zadok wrote:

> In message <Pine.SOL.4.58.0311211113590.12965 at sparky.ic.sunysb.edu>, Adam David Alan Martin writes:
> >
> > On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Erhan H Senlik wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > How do I find file creation date, even after the modification or changes.?
> > >
> > > I know that ls -l shows the last modified time, ls -lu shows the
> > > last accessed time, and ls -lc shows the last status change time.
> > >
> > > Is there a way to get it? Maybe FSL ppl can help me out here :)
> >
> >
> > As Erhan and Prof Zadok said, UNIX only had 3 times "ctime" "mtime" and
> > "atime".  Change time (As it means now.  See Zadok's reply for all about this.),
> > Modify time, and Access time.  As such, I do not believe that ALL
> > Unix-type file systems will provide a mechanism for even RECORDING a file's
> > creation time.  I do not think this information will be accessible from a
> > typical 'ls' command, as it's not standard-Unix.  If you're using a filesystem
> > that records a creation time, there may be some kind of tool associated with
> > that filesystem, to read such data.
>
> You're right.  File systems and OSs simply didn't design that field in.
> That's why it's been like that for 20+ years.  But in the last 2 years there
> have been major movements to resolve the whole POSIX ACL/EA fiasco, and
> finally several OSs are implementing it (NFSv4 is a big push toward that).
> With EAs available in more OSs each year, it'd be feasible to add an orig
> creation time that'd be supported by many of them.
>
> BTW, we have a project that plans to transparently add EA support to file
> systems, even if they don't support it natively.  See
> http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-extattrfs.html

Cool!  I think I'll mess around with this a while... See what I can break :-)

>
> > It's been a while, but I believe ext/2 (And then by implication ext/3) save
> > a fourth time.  This may be the creation time, or something totally different.
> > Again, I haven't really looked at ext/2's implementation in quite some time,
> > so I may be confusing it with something else.  I do know that there is at least
> > ONE filesystem available to Linux kernels, that DOES have immutable creation
> > time, I've just forgotten which it is.
>
> I believe its the dtime field, where they record the time when the inode was
> (D)eleted.  So if one wants to, one can hack ext2/3 to store orig-ctime in
> there.  However, that field isn't exposed to syscalls, so you'd have to
> create a different kind of l/stat(2) that'd return that field's value.
Yeah.  You're right.  Thanks, Prof. Zadok.  But I think messing with the dtime
might mung up the e2fsck.  I've seen it check bad dtimes on inodes, now that
you mention it.  Ext/2 appears to have some extra bits kicking around in the
permissions field....  perhaps there's enough there to put together a pointer
to an attrib file, or something with this data.... but that reminds me too
much of the extended-filenames hack on vfat32....  Probably better to just
do a good re-implementation from the start.
>
> Erez.
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> lugsb at fsl.cs.sunysb.edu
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>

--
Adam Martin
>From sybatter at yahoo.com Mon Nov 24 00:56:31 2003
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I've been using Windows for years now. This year I
switched to Linux for a change. I thought this is a
funny experience so I decided to share with everybody.

I was installing the java plugin for mozilla. When I
downloaded that .bin file from Sun, doing like what a
Windows user always did, I kept trying to run that
file which was claimed to be executable by Sun by
typing the file name and of course it didn't work.

It took me a whole day to finally realize all I needed
to do was to type 'sh
j2re-1_4_2_02-linux-i586-rpm.bin' and hit enter. :)
Then I also figured out that sh works with any
executable file such as configure, make or shell
script. So it was all good in the end. :)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
http://companion.yahoo.com/
>From vinay at mnl.cs.sunysb.edu Mon Nov 24 02:10:24 2003
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From: Vinay Pai <vinay at cs.sunysb.edu>
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That would work for shell scripts. Scripts may also be in Perl or Python
or whatver. The interpreter used it defined by the first line the
"shabang"

#!/bin/sh

or

#!/usr/bin/perl

or whatever

You can execute it by setting the executable flag and running it as
./j2re.....bin

Some people also put "." in their path, but I personally think thats a bad
idea.

Vinay

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Yi Suo wrote:

> I've been using Windows for years now. This year I
> switched to Linux for a change. I thought this is a
> funny experience so I decided to share with everybody.
>
> I was installing the java plugin for mozilla. When I
> downloaded that .bin file from Sun, doing like what a
> Windows user always did, I kept trying to run that
> file which was claimed to be executable by Sun by
> typing the file name and of course it didn't work.
>
> It took me a whole day to finally realize all I needed
> to do was to type 'sh
> j2re-1_4_2_02-linux-i586-rpm.bin' and hit enter. :)
> Then I also figured out that sh works with any
> executable file such as configure, make or shell
> script. So it was all good in the end. :)
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
> http://companion.yahoo.com/
> _______________________________________________
> lugsb mailing list
> lugsb at fsl.cs.sunysb.edu
> http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/mailman/listinfo/lugsb
>
>From scallana at ic.sunysb.edu Mon Nov 24 12:33:01 2003
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Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 12:33:05 -0500
From: Sean Callanan <scallana at ic.sunysb.edu>
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In general, even shell scripts can be executed without prefixing "sh". 
Use "head -1 {filename}" to see if the first line is
  #!{...}
where {...} is the path to a shell (or, sometimes, the Perl 
interpreter). If that is the case, then you can simply type
  chmod u+x {filename}
and from then on use {filename} like an executable.

Sean