Hi, I want to find out the "creation time" or "birth time" of a file. I know, this comes up every now and then but I could not find any recent or reliable information, just random posting on the interwebs. Here[0] it is suggested that coreutils stat(1) cannot display "birth time", although a commit[1] from 2010 states that birthtime is now supported. But even if stat(1) cannot display it, debugfs should be able to, but not here: # mkfs.ext4 /dev/loop0 # mount -t ext4 /dev/loop0 /mnt/disk/ # mount | tail -1 /dev/loop0 on /mnt/disk1 type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered) # touch /mnt/disk/foo # debugfs -R 'stat foo' /dev/loop0 debugfs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014) Inode: 12 Type: regular Mode: 0600 Flags: 0x80000 Generation: 3547819027 Version: 0x00000001 User: 0 Group: 0 Size: 0 File ACL: 0 Directory ACL: 0 Links: 1 Blockcount: 0 Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0 ctime: 0x5423a873 -- Wed Sep 24 22:30:27 2014 atime: 0x5423a873 -- Wed Sep 24 22:30:27 2014 mtime: 0x5423a873 -- Wed Sep 24 22:30:27 2014 EXTENTS: Now, fs/ext4/ext4.h defines i_crtime and it's referenced in ialloc.c and inode.c, so it seems to be used - but why can't debugfs display it? I tested this with 3.14, 3.17-rc6 and 3.16 kernels, debugfs just would not display "crtime". Thanks, Christian. [0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/50177/birth-is-empty-on-ext4 [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=abe5c1f9 -- BOFH excuse #408: Computers under water due to SYN flooding. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
