#FILE TIME STAMP HOW TO#

Some file systems support an additional entry in the inode regarding the creation time (or birth time). The answer of echox is valid but I want to add information regarding file creation time. Touch can become handy in combination with cp -u ( 'copy only when the SOURCE file is newer than the destination file or when the destination file is missing') or for the creation of empty marker files. a for access time, -m for modification time) and to influence the parsing of a new given timestamp. There are some arguments to decide which timestamp to change (e.g. For example if you mount a partition with the noatime option, no access information will be written.Ī utility to change the timestamps would be touch. Remember that this sort of information depends highly on the filesystem and mount options. Stat will show you also some more information like the device, inodes, links, etc. To display this information, you can use stat which is part of the coreutils. Change - the last time meta data of the file was changed (e.g.Modify - the last time the file was modified (content has been modified).Access - the last time the file was read.On a side note, does the file type here mean only regular file and simlink, not the type such as pdf, jpg, htm, txt etc? What this means is that if, for example, the source file is a regular file and the destination is a symlink, the destination file will be overwritten, regardless of timestamp. You can pass the '-update' flag to rsync which will cause it to skip files on the destination if they are newer than the file on the source, but only so long as they are the same type of file. It doesn't care which file is newer, if it is different, it gets overwritten.

What kinds of information's change will not make theīy default, the rsync program only looks to see if the files are different in size and timestamp.

In terms of what kind of information do people say a file is 'newer' than the other?.

#FILE TIME STAMP HOW TO#

How to get and change these kinds of information by commands?.What are the differences between timestamp, modification time, and created time of a file?.I just know that ls -t and ls -f give different sorting of files and subdirectories under a directory.

File time stamp