You can set an arbitrary time using the touch
command, is there a way to get the real modified time of a file?
1 Answer
What touch
can set is the “atime” or “mtime”. POSIX systems also track the “ctime”, “inode change time”. Several alternatives for getting it:
$ ls -lc _file_
$ stat -c %z _file_
$ perl -MDate::Format -e '@_ = stat $ARGV[0]; print ctime $_[10]' _file_
Any change to the file's data or metadata (hard link count, permissions, etc.) sets the “ctime”.